Mayor and four others killed by gunman at Sicilian town hall

The Mayor of Aci Castello, a town near Catania in Sicily, and four other people were shot dead yesterday morning by a man who walked into the town hall and opened fire with a pistol.

The Mayor, Michele Toscano, a gynaecologist by profession and a member of President Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, was meeting a delegation of social workers when the man, named by police as Giuseppe Leotta, 32, asked to speak to him. When told that Mr Toscano was busy, Leotta, a casual labourer, went away but returned with a pistol. He burst into the Mayor's office and shot him dead. He killed three other people in the building, two men and a woman, and a man in his sixties who was sitting on a bench outside.

Giovanni Carioli, a senior town official, said: "It's a crazy thing. I've never seen anything like it ... We are undoubtedly dealing with a psychopath."

A former mayor of the town, Paolo Castorina, told reporters that Leotta had worked casually for the municipality for more than 10 years. "For a period he worked in the town kindergarten," he said. "One day he asked me to help him change his job because he had problems with his colleagues. I told him to be patient. He wasn't aggressive, but he certainly did not strike me as someone who was completely normal."

Another source claimed Leotta had tried several times to be hired as the Mayor's driver.

Police said that after killing five people, wounding another one and threatening two more, Leotta barricaded himself inside his home.

The parish priest, Don Vittorio Rocca, has gone on Radio Vatican to ask to Leotta to surrender. "Don't kill anybody else, not even yourself," he said.