CHIERI, Italy — A heavily armed man fatally shot his ex-wife and six other relatives and neighbors Tuesday and then killed himself in a rampage that horrified a northern Italian town, police and news reports said.
The bodies of three men and five women were found in two adjacent apartments in Chieri, a suburb of the northwestern city of Turin, said Col. Filippo Ricciarelli, of the carabinieri paramilitary police in Turin.
Italian news reports identified the assailant as Mauro Antonello, a 40-year-old gun collector and construction worker. They said he entered the home of his ex-wife, fired at her and her relatives and some neighbors in the two apartments and the garden, and then turned a gun on himself.
Ricciarelli said police found a number of pistols and an automatic weapon at the scene. The ANSA news agency said the shooter had used a pistol, a semiautomatic gun and a light machine gun.
Private TG5 television quoted a neighbor as saying he heard as many as 40 shots fired within three to five minutes.
ANSA said Antonello's victims included his ex-wife, Carla Bergamin, from whom he had separated about two years ago, her mother, brother and sister-in-law.
Ricciardelli refused to identify the dead.
The ANSA report said the couple's 7-year-old daughter was safe in school at the time of the shooting.
"I saw a man who was shooting and a person who fell to the ground," ANSA quoted witness Battista Cappa, 71, as saying. "He had a dark jacket on, and after the first shots, I went back inside my home out of fear."
The victims lived in two neat, two-story homes along a residential street of nearly identical buildings in Chieri, a town of 32,000 people about seven miles south of Turin, in Italy's northwestern Piedmont region.
"You'd never expect something like this to happen in our small town," hotel owner Franco Valdania said.
Neighbors interviewed by TG5, a private TV newscast, said they knew Antonello and Bergamin had separated somewhat acrimoniously, but said Antonello was a normal, calm person.
TG5 said Antonello had been fired from his job as a watchman and now worked in construction.
"Chieri is a tranquil place," said Antonio Piras, the manager of the Sandomenico restaurant in Chieri.
"Most people work in the small textile factories in the area, the average income is high and everyone just goes about their business everyday," he said in a telephone interview.
The murder-suicide in Chieri came less than two weeks after the body of a missing 14-year-old, Desiree Piovanelli, was found near her home in Leno, near Brescia in northern Italy. She had been stabbed to death.
Three teenagers and a 36-year-old man who lived across the street from the victim have been arrested.
Tuesday's rampage followed a similar shooting Monday in a small town near Reggio Emilia, also in northern Italy.
In that case, a former commander of the Italian customs police shot and killed his wife and daughter, and injured his daughter's boyfriend, news reports said. He then turned the gun on himself but survived and was in critical condition, along with the boyfriend.
Milan daily Corriere della Sera said he filmed much of his shooting spree with a mounted videocamera.