Suspected Colorado gunman named as Robert Dear

The suspect in the deadly shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic was named on Saturday as Robert Dear (57), according to a Tweet by Colorado Springs Police public affairs' section.

The gunman who stormed the clinic on Friday killed three people and wounded nine others before surrendering to police after a bloody siege lasting several hours inside the facility.

The dead included one police officer and two civilians, Colorado Springs Police Chief Peter Carey told reporters about an hour after the suspect had been captured.

All nine surviving victims - five police officers and four civilians - were listed in good condition at area hospitals, Chief Carney said.

The suspect first engaged in a gun battle with police but ultimately surrendered to officers inside the building about five hours after the start of the violence, which played out under a steady snowfall in Colorado’s second-largest city.

A photographer at the scene saw a man in a white T-shirt with his hands cuffed behind his back being taken out of an armored police vehicle and placed in an unmarked squad car.

Police said they did not expect to confirm the suspect’s identity before Saturday, but believed he acted alone.

The dead police officer was identified as Garrett Swasey (44) a campus police officer for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who joined city police in responding to the first reports of shots fired, authorities said.

Police declined to discuss the gunman’s motivations. But the president of the Rocky Mountains chapter of Planned Parenthood, Vicki Cowart, suggested a climate of rancor surrounding abortion in the United States sets the stage for such violence.

“We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country,” she said.

Ms Cowart told CNN separately that some of the clinic’s staff escaped the gunman by following security protocol and hunkering down in “safe rooms” built into the facility.

The Colorado Springs clinic has been the target of repeated protests by anti-abortion activists, and in recent years moved to new quarters on the city’s northwest side - a facility derided as a “fortress” by critics of Planned Parenthood.

The non-profit group, devoted to providing a range of reproductive health services, including abortions, has come under renewed pressure in recent months from conservatives in Congress seeking to cut off federal support for the organization.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers said authorities were able to help guide the movements of officers through the building by watching live feeds from surveillance cameras mounted inside.

But a city police spokeswoman, Lieutenant Catherine Buckley, said it took officers a number of hours to establish communication with the suspect before he gave himself up.

“We did get officers inside the building. They were able to shout to the suspect and make communication with him and at that point they were able to get him to surrender and he was taken into custody,” Buckley said.

An hour earlier, police said progress in securing the building was slowed by the fact that the gunman brought “some bags” with him into the clinic and left several items outside, all of which needed to be checked for possible booby traps or explosives.

After the arrest, Lieut Buckley said it would take hours more, and perhaps days, for investigators to fully process the crime scene.

CNN reported that investigators had located the suspect’s car, and the vehicle would be searched for explosives.

Police swarmed the area around the building after an emergency call reporting shots fired at about 11:30am Mountain Time (6:30pm Irish time), and officers ultimately confronted the suspect inside the building, Lieut Buckley said.

Television footage aired by CNN showed a number of clinic staff and patients being escorted safely into police vehicles from the building, which lies on the northwest side of Colorado Springs, about 112km south of Denver.

The FBI and agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were assisting local investigators.

US president Barack Obama was notified of the shooting by his Homeland Security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and "will be updated on the situation as necessary, a White House official said.

Reuters