News Service from House Harris

US: Two wounded in Washington Holocaust museum shooting

WASHINGTON, June 10 AFP - A gunman opened fire at the Holocaust museum here on Wednesday, hitting a security guard before being wounded himself, sparking panic in Washington's tourist area, officials and witnesses said.

The gunman and security guard were taken to a hospital with gunshot wounds, a police spokesman said. A third person was slightly wounded, possibly by breaking glass, but did not need further treatment.

While the motive for the shooting remained unclear, Fox and NBC television reported that its correspondents had been told the gunman was 89 years old and may have links to a white supremacist organisation.

As helicopters whirred overhead and police closed off nearby roads, police Sergeant David Schlosser told reporters the gunman had walked into the building carrying "a long gun".

"The man that initially entered the museum fired at one of the security officers. So, both that security officer and the gunman have received gunshot wounds," Schlosser told reporters.

"My understanding is that two other security officers at the museum returned gunfire at the man that had entered the museum.

"Both the security guard that was initially shot and that gunman have been transported to George Washington University hospital, and I don't know the condition of them."

Witness Angela Andelson, 22, visiting from San Francisco, told AFP she heard possibly five shots fired.

"I was by the entrance when the gunman came in. I was walking toward the exit on the other side of the entrance," she said.

"I heard a shot and thought it was sort of a loud, like someone had dropped something. So I kind of turned to look.

"And I see all these security guards kind of like ducking. I kind of glanced again and saw a gunman coming in ... a long looking kind of gun. I just ran in to one of the exhibits to try to take cover.

"I heard the first one. When I turned and looked there were maybe two to four more shots that I heard," said Andelson, adding "people were screaming and ducking down getting on the floor, getting under benches".

Another witness, Maria Hernandez, had been with her grandparents walking through the haunting exhibits which chronicle the Holocaust and the genocide of six million Jews under the Nazis.

"We were in the exhibit 'Remember the Children' and we heard rounds fired and through the glass doors I saw a security guard firing towards the shooter and a man on his belly on the floor and when I looked back again, we were heading toward the exit, I saw blood all over the floor," she told AFP.

"He was hit real bad."

The shooting comes just days after US President Barack Obama visited the Middle East and pressed Israel to halt the settlement building in the West Bank, and also paid tribute to those killed in the Holocaust with a visit to a Nazi death camp.

A spokesman for the museum told AFP the building, which is about 500 metres from the White House, had been evacuated as the first shots were heard.

More than 30 million people have visited the museum since its opening in 1993, including 85 heads of state.

During a solemn visit to the former Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, Germany, last week Obama renewed a historic commitment to Israel.

Flanked by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama laid a white rose at a memorial plaque for the camp's more than 56,000 victims before taking a tour of its barracks and crematorium.

"To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful," he said.

"This place is the ultimate rebuke of those thoughts - a reminder of our duty to confront those who tell lies about our history."

But over the past few months tensions between the United States and its key ally Israel have risen to levels not seen in 20 years as Washington presses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to publicly back the principle of a Palestinian state and freeze all settlement activity on occupied land.