A Latvian man committed suicide in a forest after shooting to death seven people with an automatic hunting rifle, police said Sunday.
Criminal police chief Alois Blonskis said a tracker dog sniffed out the body of the attacker, identified as Yuri Chubarov, 47, after a manhunt involving more than 500 people.The body was found around one mile from the scene of the shooting spree Saturday in which five men and two women were killed and one man seriously injured.
"The man evidently shot himself," Blonskis said.
The attack took place near the town of Iecava, some 25 miles south of the Latvian capital Riga.
The search was launched with orders to catch the attacker dead or alive as he was still believed to be carrying the rifle and other hunting weapons.
A helicopter, police officers, an elite anti-terrorist unit and the paramilitary Home Guard were all drafted in to hunt for the killer and roadblocks were thrown up in the region.
Latvian radio described the hunt as the largest since the Baltic state quit the former Soviet Union in 1991.
A local news agency, the Baltic News Service (BNS), reported that the killings were an apparent revenge attack as the man had accused his victims of setting fire to his house.
Latvian television Saturday night showed pictures of the victims lying on a bleak, muddy field, their corpses spattered with dark bullet wounds.
It quoted eyewitnesses as saying the gunman chased his victims around the field in his car, picking them off one by one.
Prime Minister Guntar Krasts sent his condolences to the relatives of the victims, calling the attack unprecedented in terms of cruelty and the numbers killed.
Latvia, a small republic of 2.6 million people, is unused to such incidents of bloodshed, although violent crime has soared since it regained independence from Moscow.