By Barry Ellsworth
TRENTON, Ontatio
At least seven party-goers were shot and injured, two critically, at a New Year’s Eve house party in Calgary.
Police said the exact number of victims who were shot is still unclear but the injured are all believed to be in their 20s, local media reported.
City police received multiple emergency calls from a home in the southwest neighborhood of Killarney about 5:05 a.m. Thursday. Police said they do not yet have a description or know how many suspects might be involved.
About 50 people were in the house or adjacent area and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that as many as 15 witnesses were transported to police headquarters by a city transit bus. But Det. Steve Adair of the Calgary police department told the CBC that police, “are not getting a great deal of co-operation” from witnesses.
The shootings come only two days after what Edmonton police describe as an “extreme case of domestic violence” in the shooting deaths of six adults and two children, Dec. 29-30.
The suspect in that shooting, 53-year-old Phu Lam, later shot and killed himself at a nearby restaurant.
Edmonton is the capital of Alberta and it and Calgary are the two major cities in the province.
Lam’s killing rampage was the worst mass murder since 1956, when Alberta legislature member John Etter Clark shot and killed seven people on his family’s farm.
Edmonton police said Lam used a stolen 9-mm handgun for his murder spree.
Cyndi Duong was shot and killed Dec. 29 inside her home, but there is apparently no connection between her and Lam, perhaps a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, local media reported.
Police believe by the time he killed Duong, Lam had already murdered seven others in a north Edmonton home where he was one of the home’s owners.
Police found the bodies of three women, two men and a boy and a girl in the house just after midnight Dec. 30. Lam’s body was found Tuesday morning at a restaurant in nearby Fort Saskatchewan.
Some media reported that the seven were related to Lam, but their relationships remained unclear as of Thursday afternoon.
The eight shooting deaths fall one short of the 135-year-old provincial mass murder record, the Edmonton Journal reported.
In 1879, Cree Indian guide Swift Runner killed nine family members in the area of Fort Saskatchewan.
www.aa.com.tr/en
