MONTREAL: Police in western Canada were investigating Wednesday the “senseless mass murder” of six adults and two children, who were apparently slain by a depressed man who later killed himself.

Police Chief Rod Knecht said killings -- the worst ever in Edmonton -- were “planned and deliberate” and apparently were carried out during a domestic dispute.

The killings began late Monday in the southern part of Edmonton, a city of nearly one million people in Alberta province, where a man shot to death a woman in her 30s, Knecht said.

The man then headed to a residence in the north of the city, where he killed another seven people — three women, two men, a girl and a boy.

Alerted by reports of a disturbance, police went Monday initially to a home in Edmonton where they discovered the body of the first female victim.They went later that evening to investigate reports of a “suicidal male” at a house in the north of the city.

An initial visit to the house showed nothing that appeared out of the ordinary, but when police returned a few hours later and entered the home, they discovered the bodies of the seven murder victims. The body of the suspected killer, an apparent suicide, was found early Tuesday in a Vietnamese restaurant in Fort Saska­tchewan, a northeastern suburb of Edmonton.

Published in Dawn, January 1st, 2015