British Stunned as Gunman Kills 14, Self in Rampage

A gun fancier armed with an automatic rifle, a pistol and hand grenades terrorized a quiet English town Wednesday, killing 14 people and wounding 14 others before killing himself.

The rampage stunned Britons. It was the worst gun-related incident in memory in a country where the majority of police officers still carry no firearms.

The gunman, identified as Michael Ryan, a bachelor in his mid-20s, shot his mother and the family dog, set the family house ablaze, then strolled through his hometown of Hungerford, 60 miles west of London, firing indiscriminately at one person after another as shoppers in the market town fled in panic.

Ryan was finally cornered in a local school, where he turned one of the guns on himself. He was found dead by members of a police assault team that stormed the school.

One of the dead was a local police officer who, though unarmed, tried to reason with Ryan.

The killing began early in the day about 20 miles west of Hungerford, where Ryan is believed to have shot and killed a woman picnicking with her two children in the woods near the town of Marlborough. The children, aged 4 and 2, were found wandering lost and distraught.

Ryan then drove to a service station in the village of Froxfield, six miles west of Hungerford, where he fired at the cashier but missed, and then sped away to Hungerford, a town of 8,000 people.

There, dressed in army fatigues and a protective flak jacket and armed with a Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, a pistol and grenades, he wandered the streets, firing at people in their gardens and in their cars.

Police closed off the town’s roads and called to residents over loudspeakers to stay indoors. Armed police reinforcements were rushed in while police helicopters hovered overhead.

One of his victims was an 84-year-old man who had been working in his garden.

Four of the 14 wounded were listed in serious condition at a hospital in the nearest large city, Swindon. Among them was a girl of 10. Many of the wounded were under 18.

“He was shooting anything that moved,” a witness said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Another witness, Jennifer Hibberd, said: “He was just strolling around very calmly and shooting. He was firing his rifle from side to side and reloading from a band of cartridges on the chest of his jacket.”

Hibberd said she knew Ryan as “rather a lone sort of person” who liked cars. She said he had lived with his mother, who was widowed several years ago.

Christopher Bowsher, 29, said he saw Ryan “standing, holding a Kalashnikov rifle on his arm just like ‘Rambo.’ He threw the rifle down and held a pistol in his other hand.”

The region’s senior police officer, Thames Valley Chief Constable Colin Smith, said that most of the victims died in the first few minutes after the shooting began, although it lasted for about eight hours.

A police inspector said: “It is a complete mystery. We genuinely do not know why he did it.”

Ryan was born and raised in Hungerford, a small Berkshire market town best known for its trout fishing and antiques. Local residents said that he was a gun fancier, a dealer in old weapons and that he belonged to a gun club. He reportedly had permits for five weapons.

Douglas Hogg, an undersecretary of state at the Home Office, said that as a result of the incident, the government will review gun-licensing procedures.

Recent mass murders involving guns in England have usually involved families--in 1984, Jeremy Bamber slaughtered five relatives with a rifle--rather than random attacks on strangers, although Barry Williams killed five neighbors in a shooting spree in 1978.