A man carrying a rifle and a handgun opened fire in a medical office building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Wednesday afternoon, killing four people and injuring several others before apparently taking his own life in the latest mass shooting to shock the country, the authorities said.

In an interview late on Wednesday night, Captain Richard Meulenberg of the Tulsa Police Department said the attack was not random.

“This wasn’t an individual who just decided he wanted to go find a hospital full of random people,” he said. “He deliberately made a choice to come here and his actions were deliberate.” Captain Meulenberg declined to say any more about the gunman’s motive.

The police did not reveal the identity of the gunman, but at an earlier news conference, deputy chief Eric Dalgleish said that he was between 35 and 40 years old.

The police received a call about a shooting at 4:52pm (local time), and they arrived at the scene four minutes later, Chief Dalgleish said. The gunfire is believed to have taken place in one section of the second floor of the Natalie Medical Building on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital, he said. The sound of gunfire drew officers to that area.

“There is an orthopaedic centre, an orthopaedic office, there, but I’m unaware if that occupies the whole floor, or if there are other offices on the floor,” he said, adding that it was “at least part of the scene”.

As police officers arrived at the second-floor entrance, the gunfire stopped, Captain Meulenberg said in a telephone interview. Officers entered and immediately found a victim, and as they continued their search, they found the body of the gunman, who had apparently shot himself with a pistol, he said.

Chief Dalgleish said that the victims could have been a combination of workers and patients. None of the wounded had life-threatening injuries, the police said, and no officers were injured in the attack, during which the gunman fired both his weapons.

Captain Meulenberg said that the number of people wounded from being shot seemed to be “very low” but that there were other injuries tied to hundreds of people fleeing the building at the time of the attack.

The Muskogee Police Department said that it was alerted by the Tulsa Police Department that the gunman might have left a bomb at a residence in Muskogee, about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa.

New York Times News Service