Vegas shooter who killed 3 was a professor who recently applied for a job at UNLV

LAS VEGAS (AP) —The gunman in Wednesday's shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was a professor who had unsuccessfully sought a job at the school, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press.

He previously worked at East Carolina University in North Carolina, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorised to release the information publicly.

Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and dorms as the gunman roamed the floors of a UNLV building, killing three people and critically wounding a fourth before dying in a shootout with police.

The attack was the worst shooting in the city since October 2017, when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 after opening fire from the window of a room at Mandalay Bay casino on the world-famous Las Vegas Strip only a couple miles from the UNLV campus.

Lessons learned from that shooting — the deadliest in modern US history — helped authorities to work "seamlessly" in reacting to the UNLV attack, Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a news conference.

At about 11:45 a.m., the gunman opened fire on the fourth floor of the building that houses UNLV's Lee Business School, then went to several other floors before he was killed in a shootout with two university police detectives outside the building, UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia said.

Authorities gave the all-clear about 40 minutes after the first report of an active shooter.

Three people were killed and a fourth was hospitalised in critical but stable condition, police said.

It wasn't immediately clear how many of the school's 30,000 students were on campus at the time, but McMahill said students had been gathered outside the building to eat and play games. If police hadn't killed the attacker, "it could have been countless additional lives taken," he said.

"No student should have to fear pursuing their dreams on a college campus," the sheriff said.

Police didn't immediately identify the victims, the attacker or the motive and didn't say what kind of weapon was used, although some witnesses reported hearing as many as 20 shots fired.

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