At least eight people killed in rail yard shooting in San Jose, California

Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Deputy Russell Davis said at a news conference the gunman was also dead. The gunman was a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) employee, he said.

Davis said he could not say how the gunman died or whether police officers fired their weapons at the scene.

The shooting took place just before 7 a.m. Pacific Time (1400 GMT) at a light rail yard run by the VTA near the city’s main airport. A bomb squad was searching the yard after “at least one” explosive device was found, Davis said.

“A horrible tragedy has happened today and our thoughts and love go out to the VTA family,” Glenn Hendricks, the chairman of the VTA board, said at the news conference.

He said the shooting took place in a part of the yard where workers do maintenance on vehicles, and was not in the yard’s operations and control centre.

San Jose, a city with about one million residents, lies at the heart of Silicon Valley, a global centre of technological innovation and home of some of America’s biggest tech companies.

“We are in a very dark moment,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said at the news conference. “We will do everything possible to ensure this never happens again in our city.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had agents assisting at the crime scene.

Mass shootings are common in the United States, which has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.

In March, eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were shot dead in a string of attacks at day spas in and around Atlanta, and less than a week later, 10 people were killed at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

REUTERS