BRATISLAVA, Slovakia,Aug 31,2010 :Slovak police are checking a suspicious package near the scene of a rampage where a man armed with a machine gun and two pistols killed seven people and himself.

Spokeswoman Petra Hraskova says police received a phone call Tuesday morning saying there was a suspicious item on the street in the dilapidated Devinska Nova Ves neighborhood of Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

She declined to provide more details.The area was sealed off as police used a sniffer dog to approach a package under a black car.

Officials say that at least five of those murdered in Monday’s bloodbath were members of a Roma, or Gypsy, family. Fifteen others were wounded. Police are still investigating the shooter’s motives.

A gunman who killed seven people and wounded at least 13 in a rampage in Bratislava was in legal possession of the assault rifle he used, police said Tuesday.

The gunman, who killed himself after the Monday shooting spree, was a 48-year-old man from Devinska Nova Ves, the outskirts of the Slovak capital where the shooting took place, police said in a statement.

“The police found an SA Vz.58 assault rifle. He also had two handguns and several full magazines. The man owned all these weapons legally,” police said.

The shooting started on Monday morning in a flat inhabited by a Roma family in a housing estate in an otherwise quiet northwestern district of the city.

The man a former soldier, according to Slovak media — shot dead four women and one man in the flat and another man outside, before killing a 52-year-old woman with one of a series of random shots into windows.

Police said 13 people had been wounded, reducing the official numbers from Monday by two.

They also declined to speculate on a motive for one of the worst such incidents in the country’s history.

But a middle-aged man living opposite the house where the shooting started, who identified himself only as Jaro, claimed the murdered family living in the prefabricated building which is home to mostly poor people had a bad reputation and was “noisy.”

“I didn’t know the gunman but people say he was nuts. He used to wear a fur coat in summer and boxer shorts in winter, singing on the street,” he told .