Washington Navy Yard shooting: Gunman brings terror to US base Barack Obama, the US President, speaking earlier at the White House, described the shooting as "cowardly" but did not indicate any information to suggest the attack was a terrorist incident. We are confronting yet another mass shooting. And today it happened on a military installation in our nation's capital. It's a shooting that targeted our military and civilian personnel," he said, promising to do "everything in our power" to hold those responsible to account. Armoured vehicles at the Washington Navy Yard At the height of the attack, workers in Washington were advised to stay indoors and the US Senate, which is less than two miles from the Navy Yard, announced it would be locked down "out of an abundance of caution" for the safety of staff and legislators. The Special Response Team that helped track Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the marathon bomb suspect, in Boston in April, was among the 20 special agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dispatched to the scene. The Special Response Team, which is based in Washington, consists of officers who are trained for "high-risk operations" including manhunts, hostage rescue and "dynamic entry techniques." The shooting came nine months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which 20 children and six members of staff were killed, and four years after the Fort Hood shooting in which 13 US Army personnel were killed by a military psychiatrist. President Barack Obama comments on the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard Reagan National Airport, one of Washington's two airports, had a temporary no-fly order imposed during the incident. The building targeted was the military's headquarters for Naval Sea Systems Command, which buys, builds and maintains ships, submarines and combat systems. Approximately 3,000 people work at the headquarters, many of them civilians. At least one police officer who confronted the gunman was confirmed dead, with another listed as being in a "critical condition" among those who were removed by helicopter from the rooftops. Cathy Lanier, the police chief for the District of Columbia, said the response of police officers had been "nothing short of heroic." With at least 12 confirmed dead at this point, I think the actions by the police officers without question helped to reduce the number of lives lost. "So our hearts go out to the families, certainly of all the victims here, but our gratitude to the front-line officers who ran into danger this morning," she said. A federal agent relays information at the scene of the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Witnesses told The Telegraph that they had fled to safety as bullets struck the ceiling and the walls around them. There was a tall black guy who stepped around the corner maybe 20 yards from us with a gun in his hand. He pointed the gun our way and started shooting," said Todd Brundidge, an executive assistant at Navy Sea Systems Command. I feel really lucky because if it had been two or three seconds later he could have been right up on us. I'm just lucky to be here. Armed police at the scene. Courtesy @thekarami/Twitter Another witness, Rick Mason, told the Associated Press news agency that he saw a gunman shooting from a fourth-floor balcony in the hallway outside his office, aiming at people in the building's cafeteria. Patricia Ward, who was in the cafeteria said: "It was three gunshots straight in a row - pop, pop, pop. Three seconds later, it was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, so it was like about a total of seven gunshots, and we just started running.