Five reported dead in Illinois college shooting

DEKALB, Illinois (Reuters) - A man opened fire in a crowdedlecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday,killing four people and wounding a number of others beforekilling himself, media reports and authorities said.

Police on the 25,000-student college 65 miles (104 km) westof Chicago said the gunman was a student from another collegebut they did not publicly identify him.

They said he killed himself on the same classroom stagefrom where he began shooting near the end of a mid-afternoonlecture on ocean science and that he had three guns.

The Chicago Tribune and other media reported that four ofthe 18 or more people wounded had died but the university didnot confirm that.

A local hospital said on its Web site that one person, whowas not identified as the gunman, had died, and that 6 were incritical condition after the latest in a series of shootings atU.S. colleges and high schools in recent years.

It said it had admitted 17 people wounded in the shooting.

Officials at the campus said they did not know the motiveof the black-clad gunman, who they and witnesses said appearedsuddenly at the front of the lecture hall and opened fire.

Witnesses said terrified students, some of them bleedingprofusely from neck and other wounds after being hit bybuckshot, fled the classroom after the gunman began shootingseemingly at random.

"Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg,"George Gaynor, a student who was in the hall told the NorthernStar, the student newspaper on the campus.

He said "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on" firedthe shots.

Within two hours of the shooting, police said the area hadbeen secured. They said the gunman had killed himself.

"Campus police report that the immediate danger haspassed," the university said on its Web site. "The gunman is nolonger a threat."

One student told local radio that roughly 140 students werein the classroom when the man opened fire. Ambulances swarmedonto the snow-covered campus and classes were cancelled for therest of the day and Thursday.

"IS THIS REAL?"

One male student said he was sitting in the class, takingnotes when the gunman entered from behind a curtain, firing ashotgun. "He was just shooting, and people were screaming."

Kristina Balluff, a student, said the gunman was dressed inblack pants and came onto the classroom stage, which iselevated above where the students sit, and began firing.

"I looked at this girl next to me and actually said, 'isthis real?' I think the professor ... ducked out of the way."

Mass shootings are not rare in the United States, where guncontrol is less strict than in many countries and where thegun-ownership lobby is politically influential.

A university in Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia Tech, becamethe site of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S.history in April last year when a gunman killed 32 people andhimself.

Last week, a nursing student shot dead two women and killedherself in front of horrified classmates at a college inLouisiana.

In December, a threat was found scrawled on a wall atNorthern Illinois University referring to the Virginia shootingand threatening similar violence, but officials said they hadno reason to link that to Wednesday's incident.

(Reporting by Andrew Stern and Michael Conlon; Editing byStuart Grudgings)