Ottawa: Five people were killed and two critically injured in a school shooting in a remote part of Saskatchewan on Friday and a male suspect was in custody, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and police said.
Trudeau did not give a motivation for the shooting in La Loche, about 600 km (375 miles) north of the city of Saskatoon.
"Obviously this is every parent's worst nightmare," said Trudeau, who was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum.
Mass shootings are relatively rare in Canada, which has stricter gun laws than the United States. With five dead, La Loche would be the country's worst school shooting since 14 college students were killed at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989.
The shooting occurred in the high school, called the Dene Building, and another location in Saskatchewan, Trudeau and Canadian police said. The school remained on lockdown and the total number injured is not yet known, police said.
Police took the suspect into custody outside the school and seized a gun.
La Loche acting Mayor Kevin Janvier told the Canadian Press the incident may have started at the suspect's home.
“I’m not 100 percent sure what’s actually happened but it started at home and ended at the school," Janvier said.
Among Canada’s provinces, Saskatchewan had the highest rate of police-reported family violence in 2014, double the national rate of 243 incidents per 100,000 people, according to a Statistics Canada report on Thursday.
Extra doctors and nurses were sent to treat patients in Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority's 16-bed hospital, said spokesman Dale West. He declined to say how many people had been injured.
Teddy Clark, chief of the Clearwater River Dene Nation, said his daughter told him about the shooting, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
"We're just trying to pull together here and make sense of all this," Clark told CBC television. "It's not a very pretty scene right now."
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