Eight people remain in hospital after Kyiv shooting, mayor says

Eight people remain hospitalised in Kyiv after being wounded in a shooting that killed six people, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Sunday.

A Russian-born man opened fire from an automatic rifle on passersby on Saturday before barricading himself in a supermarket with hostages, where he was shot dead by police.

Police stormed the supermarket after unsuccessfully trying to negotiate with the suspect for 40 minutes, although officers were initially filmed running away from the incident, prompting the resignation of a police chief.

Of the injured, a child, whose parents were killed in the shooting, suffered moderate wounds, while one of the adults was in critical condition.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that the shooting, which happened in the capital's leafy Holosiivskyi district, injured 14 people.

"They are all receiving all necessary medical care," the mayor said on Telegram.

The supermarket has been cordoned off and remains closed. Bullet holes are visible in windows of the supermarket, and blood stains can still be seen on the pavement and asphalt.

Flowers were left near a residential building a couple of hundred metres from the supermarket, where the shooter shot his first victims.

"I saw how people grabbed children from the playground and ran away. They screamed: 'run away, hide.' People didn't understand what was going on. They said that there was a man there, a man was shooting with a machine gun," Daryna, a 31-year-old local resident, told Reuters.

Another local resident, 73-year-old pensioner, told Reuters that the man he saw shooting bystanders on Saturday "looked kind of smart".

"I don't want to clear him of blame or anything like that... but he didn't look like a killer."

Shootings of this nature are extremely rare in Ukraine and the country's security service said the incident was being investigated as a terrorist act.

Police have not yet identified a motive for the crime.