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Crime

Shooting at US Pearl Harbor military base

December 5, 2019

Authorities at Hawaii's Pearl Harbor-Hickam military base have said a sailor assigned to a nuclear submarine has shot dead two people and wounded a third. The dockyard near Honolulu was in lockdown for two hours.

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Pearl Harbor
Image: AFP/K. Nishimura

Officials at the base — a combined US Air Force and Navy installation — said via Twitter that the incident occurred at approximately 2:30 p.m. Wednesday local time (0030 Thursday GMT) The lockdown lasted about 2 hours.

Two victims were killed and a third had been hospitalized and was in a "stable condition," said Rear Admiral Robert Chadwick at a press briefing.

He identified the shooter as "active-duty sailor assigned to the USS Columbia SSN 771" — a nuclear reactor-powered submarine. The assailant had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound," Chadwick said.

Hawaii News Now, a local television channel, had earlier quoted a witness as saying the gunshot victims were civilians and the shooting happened at the sprawling base's Dry Dock 2.

A security guard with machine gun and uniformed soldier
On alert at Pearl-Harbor-Hickam after Wednesday's shootingImage: picture-alliance/dpa/C. Jones

One witness told the AFP news agency that he saw three victims on the ground and the gunman, who was wearing a sailor's uniform, shoot himself in the head.

Those details were later confirmed by officials at the base via their official Twitter account.

Navy officials and base security had launched an investigation and US President Donald Trump has been briefed on the situation, according to White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.

David Ige, governor of Hawaii, tweeted "White House has reached out to offer assistance from federal agencies, and the state is standing by ready to assist."

In another tweet, he added that he joined "in solidarity with the people of Hawaii" and expressed heartbreak over the incident.

Pearl Harbor-Hickam neighbors Honolulu's International Airport. The local media channel said all its commercial flights had continued to operate.

The incident comes three days before the 78th anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by imperial Japanese warplanes. That 1941 attack left 2,403 US service personnel dead and prompted the United States to enter World War II by declaring war on Japan.

kmm,ipj/se (AFP, dpa, Reuters)

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