Agencies
NEW YORK, Apr 4: NEW YORK: The gunman in Friday's massacre at a civic center in Binghamton, New York, is dead and surviving hostages have been freed television reports said.
The CNN network quoted several unnamed sources saying the gunman had been found dead inside the center.
And local News 10 Now television said that the town police chief told them "the building is secure and everyone alive is out."
As many as 13 people may have been killed in a rampage by a gunman believed to be holding dozens of hostages at a civic cenre in the upstate New York town of Binghamton, local radio reported.
"A dozen or more may have died in the last two hours," Bob Joseph, news director of local WNBF Radio, told CNN, quoting sources.
Reports said the gunman may have also taken between 20 and about 40 hostages in the civic centre in the small city located 135 miles (217 kilometres) northwest of New York city, near the border with Pennsylvania.
Police armed with automatic rifles surrounded the building as officers carried out several stretchers, CNN television footage showed.
The local Press and Sun-Bulletin newspaper reported that at least four people were shot and that 41 hostages were in the building -- 15 in a closet and 26 in the boiler room.
According to Joseph, the guman was believed to have parked a car so that it blocked the back door of the civic centre, preventing escape.
Last month, a man killed 10 people, many of them family members, in a shooting rampage in Alabama.
Mass shootings have become more frequent in recent years in the United States, where guns are widely available for purchase and the right to own weapons for self defense and hunting is defended by many.
On April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history when a student gunman killed 32 people and himself.