Shooting rampage in California leaves 14 dead, 17 wounded

Gunmen opened fire on a holiday party on Wednesday at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 17 others, then fled the scene, triggering an intense manhunt and a shootout with police, authorities said.

One suspect was struck by gunfire and one officer was injured in a confrontation hours after the mass shooting, San Bernardino police spokeswoman Sergeant Vicki Cervantes told reporters, adding that a second suspect might still be "outstanding."

She did not know the condition of the struck suspect but said the officer's injuries were not considered to be life-threatening.

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said in a televised news briefing earlier that as many as three suspects were believed to have made their getaway in a deer-coloured sport utility vehicle. A vehicle matching that description turned up at the shootout with police several hours later, Cervantes.

The police chief said 14 people were killed and 14 others wounded in the initial shooting spree, which unfolded at 11 a.m. on the campus of the Inland Regional Center, an agency that serves the developmentally disabled.

Cervantes later revised the toll of wounded to 17, not including the suspect and police officer who were shot later.

The shooting rampage in San Bernardino, about 60 miles (100 km) east of Los Angeles, marked the deadliest U.S. gun violence since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 27 people, including the gunman, were killed.

As the suspects fled, authorities ordered a security "lockdown" of all local schools, as well as city and county buildings, and area hospitals were placed on alert, Burguan said. Police searched door to door in the Redlands neighbourhood a few miles from the site of the attack.

Burguan said he knew of no possible motive behind the attack.

"We have no information at this point that this is terrorist-related, in the traditional sense that people may be thinking," he added. "Obviously, at minimum, we have a domestic-type terrorist-type situation that occurred here."

He said the suspects were armed with rifles.