Eight people were shot to death at three massage parlours in the Atlanta area on Tuesday evening, the authorities said, raising fears that the crimes may have targeted people of Asian descent.

Six of the people killed were Asian, and two were white, according to law enforcement officials. All but one were women.

A suspect, identified as Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia, was captured in Crisp county, about 150 miles south of Atlanta, after a manhunt, said the authorities, who had earlier released a surveillance image of a suspect near a Hyundai Tucson outside one of the massage parlours.

An official from the South Korean Consulate in Atlanta, citing the foreign ministry in Seoul, confirmed on Wednesday that four of the eight killed were ethnic Koreans. But the nationalities of the four women were not immediately known, the official said.

There have been nearly 3,800 reports of hate incidents targeting Asian-Americans nationwide since last March, according to Stop AAPI Hate. The group said the shootings on Tuesday “will only exacerbate the fear and pain that the Asian-American community continues to endure”.

Atlanta officials did not ask other massage parlours in the area to shut down as a precautionary measure, the police chief, Rodney Bryant, said at a news conference. But fear was palpable among some who work in the massage industry. A woman who answered the phone at Healing Massage Spa and identified herself as a manager said that after the shootings were reported on the news, her boss told her to close for the night.

The gunman told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had frequented massage parlours in the past before carrying out the shootings to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.

The police said the gunman claimed that he had not targeted the victims because of their race, but they cautioned that it was too early in the investigation to be sure that there wasn’t a racial motivation.

Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee county sheriff’s office added that the gunman saw the spas as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate”.

The Atlanta police initially characterised the shooting at one of the parlours in the city as a robbery in progress. The suspect in custody is white.

Four people died in the first shooting, at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, said Captain Baker . That shooting, in which a Hispanic man was injured, was reported at around 5pm.

An Atlanta police booking picture shows the shooting suspect, Robert Aaron Long Twitter/ @originalspin

At 5:47pm, the Atlanta police said, officers responded to a robbery at Gold Spa in the northeast part of the city, where they found the bodies of three women with gunshot wounds. While the officers were at the scene, the police said, they received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.

Debra and Gregory Welch, who live in the Piedmont Heights neighbourhood, said it was usually quiet and peaceful, although they referred to the stretch where the shootings took place as the community’s “red-light district”. On the same block, near Cheshire Bridge Road, there is another massage parlour, a tattoo shop and a strip club.

“It’s for sure disturbing,” Welch said of the shootings, “but even more so if it’s related to an anti-Asian factor from the Covid pandemic”.

In Seattle, the police department said on Tuesday night that it would increase patrols and outreach to support the city’s Asian-American community. The NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau said on Twitter that it would “be deploying assets to our great Asian communities across the city”. The FBI was assisting in the investigation, a spokesman for the Atlanta field office said.

New York Times News Service