19 Wounded, 5 Critical, In One-Man Rampage At Montreal's Dawson College

A lone guman who terrorized the 10,000-student campus of Dawson College in downrtown Montreal is "neutralized," MSNBC reported moments ago, quoting police sources. CNN says as many as three gunment may have been involved and that they believe two gunmen are dead while police search for a third in a shopping mall across from the college. CNN cites college officials as its source.

UPDATE 4:48PM EST

CNN now says four are dead in the shooting that wounded 13 at Dawson College in downtown Montreal. Another account from the Toronto Star says one person - the shooter, a man garbed in camouflage and wearing a Mohawk haircut - died and 11 were wounded.

Here is the latest from CNN:

SWAT hunts college gunmen
At least four people are dead and 13 wounded after a shooting at college in downtown Montreal. The college initially said two gunmen were killed, but police only confirmed one dead shooter. A SWAT team was in the college because "we believe there might be other suspects inside," a police spokesman said.

UPDATE 2:25AM EST 9/14

When the dust cleared, there were 19 woounded and one dead shooter, the New York Times reports this morning:

September 14, 2006
Gunman Kills Woman in Montreal; 19 Are Injured
By IAN AUSTEN
MONTREAL, Sept. 13 — A man wearing a long black coat and carrying a semiautomatic rifle shot and killed a woman and wounded 19 other people, at least five critically, at the downtown campus of a junior college on Wednesday. The man himself died after exchanging shots with the police.

The shooting Wednesday at Dawson College brought chaos and fear to the core of Canada’s second largest city as major thoroughfares were closed, office towers were evacuated and subway service was disrupted. It also evoked bitter memories of a shooting in 1989 at another downtown college where 14 women died before the gunman killed himself.

In the Dawson case, the police said an autopsy would determine whether the assailant was killed by the police or by his own weapon.

The Montreal police said it received the first call about the shooting at 12:41 p.m. Several witnesses reported seeing the man start shooting students near an entrance without a word or provocation.

As the police arrived, witnesses said, he entered the building, continuing to fire randomly as he made his way toward a crowded cafeteria. Video recorded with a camera phone showed the gunman exchanging fire with the police inside the college.

Dawson has an enrollment of about 10,000 students, most of them teenagers. About half were believed to have been on campus at the time.

Despite the early arrival of the police, the college and the neighborhood — an affluent, largely English-speaking district — fell into confusion with herds of people fleeing along streets and pouring out of a nearby shopping mall. Like much of downtown Montreal, the college is connected to a network of underground walkways that also feeds into the subway system. In what appeared to be a bid to prevent the escape of the gunman, a major subway line was closed temporarily.