Minneapolis shooting leaves one dead and 11 injured

One man has died and 11 people have been wounded in a shooting in Minneapolis.

Chaotic scenes saw people ducking into restaurants and other businesses for cover during the incident which happened shortly after midnight on Sunday.

The shooting broke out in the city’s Uptown neighbourhood, a nightlife hub with bars, restaurants and shops.

Police originally said 10 people had been shot with “various severity levels of injuries”, but revised their total upwards in a tweet posted just after 3am.

The man died in hospital, not at the scene, police said, with none of the other injuries considered life-threatening.

Police said they believed there was more than one gunman, described only as “individuals on foot”.

No-one was in custody, and police have not said what may have prompted the shooting. All of the people injured were adults.

Footage posted on Facebook shows the scene in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Screams can be heard as small crowds of people gathered, with some crouched over people lying on the pavement before police officers on bicycles arrived to attend to them.

Fred Hwang, a manager at Hoban Korean BBQ, said he was working on the front door when he heard shots from the pavement a couple of shops down.

Mr Hwang described hearing “a lot of shots” and said it appeared to be groups of people shooting at each other.

“People were trying to rush inside the restaurant for safety,” he said.

“It was a very scary experience.

“We have bullet holes inside our restaurant like on the walls and stuff. All of our front glass was broken and shattered.

“Then, just like people being in here panicking and running around, breaking this or that, it was very chaotic.”

Across the street from where the shooting began, in a shopfront shared by the Uptown Theatre and a shoe store, a police officer later on Sunday surveyed a shattered window and door and a bullet hole could be seen in a window.

The Uptown area is about 5km (three miles) west of the Minneapolis commercial area and neighbourhood hit by rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s death on May 25 after being arrested by Minneapolis police.

Some of the violence from that period reached as far as Uptown, and many shopfronts are still protected by plywood.

Mr Floyd’s death has sparked a move to overhaul the Minneapolis Police Department, with a majority of city council members pledging support for dismantling a department that many community activists have called brutal and racist.

That has prompted pushback from opponents who question how residents will be protected from violent crime.

Mr Hwang was critical of the police response time, estimating it took officers more than 30 minutes to arrive.

“Something needs to be done to protect us,” he said.

“Normally the bars on Saturday night, we all have off-duty police officers as extra security parked in front of our businesses. But no-one has that right now because police are a liability for us.”

Police had responded to at least two other shootings in south Minneapolis in the hour before the Uptown violence erupted.