Man opens fire in NY immigrants' centre

Several media reports said four people were dead. The news director of WNBF radio told CNN up to 13 people may have been killed, citing police and other unnamed sources. WBNG television news said police confirmed 12 casualties but did not specify whether they were wounded or dead.

Four people were removed from the American Civic Association building on stretchers and taken to hospitals, the Press & Sun-Bulletin newspaper reported on its website.

A police special weapons and tactics team was on the scene and the shooter was still inside, the newspaper said, citing police. Binghamton Mayor Matthew Ryan, who was at the scene, said the shooter had a high-powered rifle, the Press & Sun-Bulletin said.

The FBI in Albany was providing help including agents skilled in hostage negotiation to what it said was a "rapidly developing situation," the FBI said in Washington.

"About 15 or so employees of the Civic Association came out crying with their hands behind their heads and they were escorted by the police and they took them to ambulances and took them away," a witness told WNBF radio. "Quite a few people got out but I hear there's more (inside)," she said.

Television coverage showed police armed with rifles, some carrying shields, deployed around the building. Police closed surrounding streets and locked down a high school, WBNG said.

As MAN (MAN.XE) as 41 people were inside the building when a man entered and started shooting, WBNG said, citing police scanners. It said some fled to a basement and more than a dozen were hiding in a closet, adding that emergency dispatchers had been in contact with people inside.

The American Civic Association building is used to teach English and provide other services to recently immigrants to the United States who are preparing for U.S. citizenship.

Bob Joseph, the news director for WNBF radio, said in an interview with CNN that his sources described the shooter as an Asian man in his 20s, and that the shooter may have blocked the rear entrance to the building with a parked car.

Authorities requested a Vietnamese translator to speak with the shooter, according to the witness interviewed by WNFB.

Binghamton is about 150 miles (240 km) northwest of New York City with a population of about 45,000.

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 defence 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.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, Claudia Parsons, Joan Gralla and Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by David Storey)