Officer killed in Colorado attack was co-pastor, figure skater

Mr Obama said the suspect had been armed with an assault weapon – that was the first official word of this detail – and he also disclosed for the first time that the man had held hostages at the Planned Parenthood centre from which he opened fire at people outside in an hours long standoff with the police.

Mayor John Suthers paid tribute to the police for hauling in the gunman without further bloodshed. He is set to appear in court on Monday.

The motive of the suspect now under arrest was not known and the police was to interrogate him Saturday.

The Colorado Springs clinic has been the target of repeated protests by anti-abortion activists, and in recent years moved to new quarters derided as a “fortress” by critics.

But Vicki Cowart, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains, said in a statement Saturday that witness accounts indicate it was motivated by opposition to abortion. But she suggested that a climate of rancour surrounding abortion in the USA is setting the stage for such violence. Though we should say, that’s still very tenuous and at this point certainly not confirmed.

“We’re exchanging gunfire”, one officer said on the radio.

Authorities soon tapped into the building’s video surveillance system, and were able to monitor the gunman’s movements, officials said.

Dear’s North Carolina neighbors said they never heard him talk about abortion.

Those killed were a police officer and two civilians.

The man responsible for the attack fired from Planned Parenthood into a strip mall parking lot 350 yards away, where he struck at least some, if not all of the three he killed and nine he injured.

The attack was the latest in a series of mass shootings around the country.

Mr Obama has previously said that his failure to pass “common sense gun safety laws” in the U.S. was the greatest frustration of his presidency.

“We have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough”, Mr Obama said in a statement.

Forty-four-year-old Garrett Swasey was the first of three victims to be identified in the shootings at the clinic in Colorado Springs. The dead civilians were not named.

Swasey was a co-pastor at Hope Chapel, an evangelical church in Colorado Springs.

Shoppers barricaded themselves inside local businesses as officers from several law enforcement agencies surrounded the clinic in the central Colorado city.

The national non-profit group, devoted to providing a range of reproductive health services, including abortions, has come under renewed pressure this year from conservatives in Congress seeking to cut off federal funding for the organization.

“Some got out early throughout the afternoon, but those that didn’t were in a safe spot”, Cowart told CNN, adding that her initial information was that none of her staff or patients had been killed or injured.