PHILADELPHIA Four masked gunmen killed six men and a woman on Thursday night when they burst into a West Philadelphia house and unleashed a barrage of gunfire, police said.

They said the six male victims were killed on the scene and the woman died later in a hospital. Two other men and a woman in the house were wounded.

"We're still putting this together," said Philadelphia police Capt. James Brady, declining to comment on what the motive for the attack might have been.

The killers fled and no arrests have been made.

Police, who would not identify the victims, said they received a report of the shooting at about 8:15 p.m. and arrived to find six bodies in the dining room.

The site of the shooting, a dilapidated red brick row-house about half a block from an elementary school, and the adjoining streets were cordoned off by police.

Police said they would give a news conference on the shooting on Friday.

This was second shooting in the U.S. during this week. A heavily armed employee gunned down seven co-workers at a troubled Internet consulting firm on Tuesday, the day after Christmas, officials said.

Michael McDermott, 42, reported for work Tuesday at Edgewater Technology's Corporate Headquarters armed with a loaded AK-47 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semiautomatic Handgun.

At about 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) he allegedly walked through the office building and fatally shot seven co-workers at a firm undergoing a major reorganization in the latest of a series of mass shootings in the United States.

"I thought I was going to die," a 29-year-old Edgewater worker, who declined to give his name, told Reuters.

A prosecutor, visibly shaken after emerging from the scene, told reporters, "the Wakefield police were able to subdue Mr. McDermott, wrestle him to the ground. Place him in custody. Mr. McDermott has been placed under arrest."

The prosecutor, John McEvoy, said McDermott faces charges of "seven counts of murder. All the victims died from gunshots.

There were no other victims. There were no other shooters."

The alleged gunman was hired in March by Edgewater, an Internet software consulting firm located in a three-story renovated factory building in Wakefield. The suburb, some 15 miles northwest of Boston, is part of the high-tech corridor that rings the city.

McEvoy declined to give a motive for the shootings except to say that it was "work-related."

The shootings are the latest in a string of shootings in recent years in U.S. workplaces, schools and churches.

The most recent, in Honolulu in November 1999, also left seven dead. Others included July 1999 shootings that left nine dead at two Atlanta brokerages, August 1999 shootings that left three people dead at two office buildings in Pelham, Alabama, and in Garden Grove, California, that same month when a man opened fire in an auto parts store killing two people.

(Reuter)