Earlier, Captain Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said the wounded from the Monterey Park attack were taken to local hospitals and that their conditions ranged from stable to critical.

He said a motive for the Monterey Park attack remained unclear.

Meyer said people were “pouring out of the location screaming” when officers arrived at around 10.30pm on Saturday local time.

He said the Monterey Park Fire Department had also responded to the emergency and had treated the injured. Ten people were pronounced dead at the scene – five men and five women.

The Sheriff’s Department said the shooting occurred inside the Star Dance Studio ballroom dance club on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park.

Meyer did not explain why police had not provided any information about the shooting for several hours despite the shooter remaining on the run.

He said it was too early in the investigation to know if the gunman knew anyone in the ballroom.

Seung Won Choi, who owns the Clam House seafood barbecue restaurant across the street from where the shooting happened, told The Los Angeles Times that three people rushed into his business and told him to lock the door.

They told Choi that there was a shooter with a gun and that he had multiple rounds of ammunition on him.

Wong Wei, who lives nearby, told The Los Angeles Times that his friend was in a bathroom at the dance club when the shooting started. When she came out, he said, she saw a gunman and three bodies.

The friend then fled to Wei’s home at around 11pm, he said, adding that he was told the shooter appeared to be firing indiscriminately.

Around the scene of the shooting, police had cordoned-off streets, local news video showed.

Footage posted on social media showed injured people on stretchers being taken to ambulances by emergency staff.

Tony Lai, 35, of Monterey Park was stunned when he came out for his early morning walk to learn that the noises he heard during the night were gunshots.

“I thought maybe it was fireworks. I thought maybe it had something to do with Lunar New Year,” he said. “And we don’t even get a lot of fireworks here. It’s weird to see this. It’s really safe here. We’re right in the middle of the city, but it’s really safe.”

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, called the shooting a “heartless act of gun violence.”

Another tribute came from Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighbouring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just occurred,” he said in a tweet.

The White House said US President Joe Biden had been briefed on the situation by Homeland Security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.

Attorney General Merrick Garland was also briefed, Justice Department spokesperson Dena Iverson said.

Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people that sits at the eastern edge of Los Angeles.

The majority of its residents are Asian immigrants or their descendants, most of them Chinese.

The dance studio in downtown Monterey Park is just a few blocks from city hall on its main thoroughfare of Garvey Avenue, which is dotted with strip malls that are full of small businesses whose signs are in both English and Chinese.

Cantonese and Mandarin are both widely spoken, Chinese holidays are celebrated and Chinese films are screened in the city.

The celebration in Monterey Park is one of the largest Lunar New Year events in Southern California. Two days of festivities were planned, but officials cancelled Sunday’s events following the shooting.

The tragedy marked not just the fifth mass killing in the US since the start of the year, but also the deadliest since May 24, 2022 when 21 people were killed in a school in Uvalde, Texas.