S Rajagopalan/Newindpress

Washington, Dec 7: In a shooting spree that brought back memories of the Virginia Tech massacre last April, a gun-toting school dropout went on the rampage in a shopping mall in Omaha in Nebraska on Wednesday, killing eight people and wounding five others, before taking his own life.

The gunman, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins, was said to be a depressed youth with emotional problems, who had just lost his job and broken up with a girlfriend. He reportedly left several suicide notes. In one, he said he wanted to "go out in style". In another, he wrote, "Now, I'll be famous."

Two of the five injured shoppers were in a critical condition. The shooter, armed with an SKS assault rifle and wearing a camouflage vest, struck at the fashionable Von Maur department store at Omaha's Westroads Mall, which was crowded with holiday shoppers.

Witnesses said they heard a burst of some 30-40 rounds as terrified employees and shoppers fled or cowered for cover as the shots rang out. Omaha's Police Chief Thomas Warren said the shooting appeared to be "very random and without provocation".

The incident has once again turned the spotlight on the US's rampant gun culture, aided greatly by the constitutional right to bear arms and an overactive gun lobby. In Nebraska as in most states, private gun ownership is legal and widespread.

In the Virginia Tech episode in April, Seung-Hui Cho, a 19-year-old student of South Korean descent, had shot dead 32 people and wounded many more on the university campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, before killing himself. Cho, a loner, also had a record of mental depression.

Television broadcasts from Omaha quoted acquaintances as saying that Hawkins was a troubled youth who dropped out of high school a year ago. He had just been fired from a job at a local McDonald's and had been taking medication for emotional problems. "He was depressed the last couple months, but I never thought he'd do something that extreme," a friend said.

In a note addressed to his landlady, Debora Maruca Kovac, Hawkins said that he was sorry for everything, that he didn't want to be a burden to anybody, he loved his family, he loved all of his friends. He went on to say that he was "a piece of shit all of his life", but would now be famous.

"He was withdrawn. He was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted… He had a lot of emotional problems," Kovac said of the youth who had come to live in her house a few months ago after leaving his own mother's house.

Reports said Hawkins had been sent to jail for seven days in 2005 for disorderly conduct. And last Friday, he had been arrested for being a minor in possession of alcohol. The legal drinking age in the US is 21.

Hours before the shooting episode, President George W Bush was in Omaha for a fund-raiser. A White House statement said that Bush, who had left the city an hour before the shootings, was "deeply saddened" by the incident and "his thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families on Thursday evening".