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Manhunt underway in Pittsburgh-area execution-style murders
The massacre in Wilkinsburg, a borough of about 15,000 mostly lower and middle-income residents, is the latest in a series of mass shootings that have heightened the controversy surrounding gun control and made it a prominent campaign issue in the US presidential race. – Reuters file pic, March 11, 2016. Pennsylvania police were seeking two men suspected of ambushing partygoers at a backyard barbecue near Pittsburgh the previous night, killing five people, including a pregnant woman, and wounding three others in a hail of gunfire.
One suspect, armed with a 40-calibre handgun, shepherded victims from behind the house toward an alleyway where a second suspect armed with "an AK-47 type" rifle shot them in the head, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr said.
Police recovered 49 bullet casings from two different guns at the crime scene.
"The murders were planned, calculated, brutal," Zappala said.
The motive for the fatal shooting of four women and one man in the residential neighbourhood of Wilkinsburg, about 13km east of the city of Pittsburgh, was still unknown, but authorities were exploring whether it might be drug-related, Zappala said.
"Everybody is a person of interest. There are some we are more interested in than others," Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said at a news conference, noting that the suspects fled on foot.
The police did not have enough evidence to make arrests, he said.
The massacre in Wilkinsburg, a borough of about 15,000 mostly lower and middle-income residents, is the latest in a series of mass shootings that have heightened the controversy surrounding gun control and made it a prominent campaign issue in the US presidential race.
The shooting generated more than 10,000 Twitter posts, with many expressing outrage over gun violence.
The woman killed was eight months pregnant, and the death of her foetus was ruled a sixth homicide under Pennsylvania law, Moffatt said.
Among those wounded, the most seriously hurt were two men who remained hospitalised in critical condition, but were apparently improving, Moffatt said.
The dead ranged from 25 to 37 years old, officials said, but family members of a 38-year-old woman said she was the oldest. Three of the five who died belonged to the same extended family, Moffatt said.
One of those killed, Tina Shelton, was a mother of five who held down three jobs and was encouraged by family members to attend the barbecue as a way to relax after work, her father Vernes Pugh and other relatives told local station WPXI-TV.
Four victims died on the back porch next to the alley, while another woman died at a hospital, police said. – Reuters, March 11, 2016.
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