BERLIN (AP)
-- A shooting at a wood-processing company in central Switzerland on
Wednesday left three people dead and seven wounded, some of them
seriously, prosecutors said.
The shooting
occurred shortly after 9 a.m. at the premises of Kronospan, a company in
the small town of Menznau, west of Lucerne.
Three
people were killed, among them the suspected assailant, police in
Lucerne said in a statement. A further seven were wounded, several of
them seriously. Officials gave no further details.
The
local Neue Luzerner Zeitung newspaper cited a witness as saying that
the shooter opened fire in the company canteen. It was not immediately
clear who the shooter was, what the motive might have been or whether
the assailant worked for the company.
According to the local town council, Kronospan has some 450 employees.
"At
the moment we're all in a state of shock," Urs Fluder, a manager at
Kronospan, told Radio Pilatus, a local station. "We will see that the
families are properly informed," he added.
Gun
ownership is widespread in Switzerland, thanks to liberal regulation - a
2012 referendum to tighten controls failed - and a long-standing
tradition for men to keep their military rifles after completing
compulsory military service.
An estimated 2.3 million firearms are owned by the country's 8 million people.
But
gun crime is relatively rare, with just 24 gun killings in 2009, which
works out to a rate of about 0.3 per 100,000 inhabitants. The U.S. rate
that year was about 11 times higher.
Still,
there have been several high-profile incidents over the years, including
the killing of 14 people at a city council meeting in Zug, not far from
Lucerne, in 2001.
Last month a 33-year-old man killed three women and wounded two men in a southern Swiss village.
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