Washington: Five people have been arrested in connection with a deadly shooting inside the Mall of America in Bloomington, the US state of Minnesota.
Two 18-year-old men and three 17-year-old boys were taken into custody after police executed a search warrant on Saturday, Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges told reporters.
“I’m fairly confident we do have the person responsible for murdering the victim in custody,” Xinhua News Agency reported quoting Hodges.
A 19-year-old man was fatally shot on Friday evening inside Nordstrom, a department store, at the Mall of America, the largest shopping and entertainment complex in the US.
Officers responded to the sounds of gunshots coming from the first floor of Nordstrom and found the man with multiple gunshot wounds at the scene, where he was pronounced dead.
Police previously said the person was shot and killed after two groups of males got into an altercation.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tweeted on Saturday that his office is in touch with local officials to provide the support and resources they need.
The violence at the Mall of America on Friday “is absolutely unacceptable,” Walz said.
The Mall of America, which has more than 500 stores, went into lockdown after the shooting. It reopened on Saturday but Nordstrom was closed.
The shooting occurred before Christmas, which falls on Sunday, amid the busiest shopping week in the United States.
US Senator Chris Murphy weighed in on the shooting on Saturday, tweeting that such an incident “doesn’t happen anywhere else but here.”
The US has suffered hundreds of mass shootings and lost more than 43,000 lives to gun violence this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
–IANS