OTTAWA: Canada’s capital was jolted on Wednesday by the fatal shooting of a soldier and an attack on the parliament building in which gunshots were fired outside a room where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was speaking.

The gunman in the parliament building was shot dead, and Mr Harper was safely removed.

Canadian police said they could not “at this point” confirm whether the man who shot dead the soldier, who was guarding the National War Memorial, was the same person who shortly afterwards attacked the nearby parliament building.

Witnesses said at least 30 shots were fired after a gunman entered the parliament building and was pursued by police.

The assault came very near the room where Mr Harper was meeting members of his Conservative party, a government minister said.

“PM (Harper) was addressing caucus, then a huge boom, followed by rat-a-tat shots. We all scattered. It was clearly right outside our caucus door,” Treasury Board Minister Tony Clement said.

Parliament and buildings in downtown remained on lockdown.

Mr Harper stressed that government and parliament should continue its work, a spokesman said. “While the prime minister stated that facts are still being gathered, he condemned this despicable attack,” the spokesman said.

Police said that an operation was under way to make parliament safe and they were still in the middle of an active investigation.

“It caught us by surprise... If we had known that this was coming, we would have been able to disrupt it,” Gilles Michaud, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, (RCMP) told a news conference.

Dramatic video footage posted by the Globe and Mail newspaper showed police with guns drawn inside the main parliament building. At least a dozen loud bangs can be heard on the clip, echoing through the hallway.

Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino, a former policeman, told the Toronto Sun that parliament’s head of security, Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, shot dead a suspected gunman.

“All the details are not in, but the sergeant-at-arms, a former Mountie, is the one who engaged the gunman, or one of them at least, and stopped this,” Fantino said.

Our correspondent in Washington adds: The US State Department said that its embassy in Ottawa had been shut down after the incident.

“Our embassy in Ottawa has been locked down,” the department’s Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf told a briefing in Washington. “All embassy personnel are safe and accounted for but we are restricting their movement as a precautionary measure.” The US official said she did not want to speculate if militants of the Islamic State group or any other militant outfit were behind the shooting.

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2014