A loner with a grudge was identified as the gunman in attacks on a church and missionary center that left five people dead, police and reports said Monday.
Police in Colorado said the shooting sprees that took place within 12 hours of each other on Sunday were most likely carried out by 24-year-old Matthew Murray, who was shot dead by a security guard after killing four people.
Murray is believed to have gunned down two workers at the Youth With a Mission training center in the Denver suburb of Arvada, in the early hours of Sunday morning before escaping under the cover of darkness.
He reappeared several hours later at the New Life evangelical church in Colorado Springs -- some 120 kilometers (75 miles) away -- as around 7,000 people gathered at the facility for Sunday worship.
Murray, who police said was armed with an assault rifle, two handguns, a rucksack stuffed with ammunition and smoke grenades, shot two teenage sisters and wounded three others at the church before being shot dead.
Arvada Police Chief Don Wick told reporters at a press conference on Monday that forensic evidence linked Murray to both crime scenes.
"Testing has confirmed that the handgun found at the church in Colorado Springs is forensically linked to shell casings found at the crime scene in Arvada," Wick was quoted as saying by the Rocky Mountain News.
"Based on information obtained during the course of our investigation, we believe that Matthew Murray is responsible for the crime," Wick added.
It also emerged that Murray had been dismissed in 2002 from the missionary training facility at the center of his first shooting spree, where two workers were killed. Police were probing the circumstances of his dismissal.
The Rocky Mountain News reported that police were working on the theory that Murray was bitter over being expelled from the center's training program.
"It appears that the suspect had been kicked out of that program ... years prior, and during the past few weeks, had sent different forms of hate mail to the program, and/or its director," a search warrant affidavit stated.
Several media reports described Murray as a reclusive loner from a devoutly religious family.
Meanwhile, the head of the New Life church said security at the facility had been boosted after news of the shooting earlier Sunday in Arvada, a measure that possibly saved hundreds of lives.
"Although we are grieving today for the loss of two lives, hundreds of lives were saved yesterday because of the plans that were set in place," Boyd said.
The New Life Church made headlines in 2006 when its founder, Ted Haggard, resigned as a pastor after admitting to what he called "sexual immorality" in a scandal involving a male prostitute.
The Colorado shootings came just days after a teenager armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire on Christmas shoppers at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska killing eight people before turning the gun on himself.
This year also saw the worst ever school shooting in the United States, when a deranged student killed 32 classmates and staff at Virginia Tech university. That rampage had already revived debate about gun crime in the United States, which authorities say is home to more than 200 million privately owned firearms for a population of just over 300 million.
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