DENVER - Police in Colorado were looking into possible links between two church-related shootings in the U.S. Christian heartland over the weekend that left four victims and one of the gunmen dead.
The initial death toll was four in Sunday's shootings, including the gunman, but one of the people wounded at the New Life evangelical church in Colorado Springs died late in the evening, media outlets quoted hospital officials as saying.
A man dressed in black, wearing combat boots and holding an assault rifle and at least one handgun, opened fire in the parking lot of the vast New Life church after Sunday services, killing one person on the spot and wounding others.
A security guard then shot and killed the gunman, Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers told a news conference.
Police did not identify the gunman. There were about 7,000 people in the building when the shooting erupted, a pastor said.
In an earlier incident on Sunday, 70 miles away, a man entered a Christian missionary training centre in the Denver suburb of Arvada and killed two young missionaries with a handgun shortly after midnight, police said.
The Arvada gunman, also dressed in dark clothing, fled on foot in the snow.
The attacks -- both at Christian religious buildings on a Sunday shortly before Christmas -- caused shock and dismay.
They came just four days after a 19-year-old man killed eight people and then himself with an assault rifle at a busy shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska.
Police in the two Colorado cities were sharing information but there was no indication of the motive in either case.
