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rain of bullets


AT least 50 people died and more than 400 more hurt when a 64-year-old gunman with an arsenal of at least 10 rifles fired on Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday, raining down bullets from a 32nd-floor window for minutes before killing himself.

The death toll, which police emphasized was preliminary, would make the massacre the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, eclipsing last year’s massacre of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.

Some 22,000 people were in the crowd when a man police identified as Stephen Paddock opened fire, sparking a panic in which some people trampled on others, as law enforcement officers scrambled to locate the gunman.

Shocked concertgoers, some with blood on their clothes, wandered the streets afterwards.

Police said they had no information about Paddock’s motive, and that he had no criminal record and was not believed to be connected to any militant group. Paddock killed himself before police entered the hotel room he was firing from, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters.

“We have no idea what his belief system was,” Lombardo said.

“We believe the individual killed himself prior to our entry,” Lombardo told a news conference.

Lombardo said there were more than 10 rifles in the room where Paddock killed himself after checking into the hotel on Thursday. Paddock was not known to law enforcement, Lombardo said.

The dead included one off-duty police officer, Lombardo said. Two on-duty officers were injured, including one who was in stable condition after surgery and one who sustained minor injuries, Lombardo said. Police warned the death toll may rise.

Police are still finding people who had taken cover during the attack, Lombardo said.

“It’s going to take time for us to get through the evacuation phase,” Lombardo said.

Video of the attack showed panicked crowds fleeing as sustained rapid gunfire ripped through the area.

“It sounded like fireworks. People were just dropping to the ground. It just kept going on,” said Steve Smith, a 45-year-old visitor from Phoenix, Arizona, who had flown in for the concert. He said the gunfire went on for an extended period of time.

“Probably 100 shots at a time. It would sound like it was reloading and then it would go again,” Smith said. “People were shot and trying to get out. A lot of people were shot.”

Las Vegas’s casinos, nightclubs and shopping draw some 3.5 million visitors from around the world each year and the area was packed with visitors when the shooting broke out shortly after 10 p.m. local time.

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