(Reuters) -Dallas police on Thursday searched for a gunman who entered a hair salon in the city's Koreatown section and opened fire, wounding three women in an incident that echoed last year's Atlanta-area shooting rampage that targeted people of Asian descent.
The victims - the owner of the Hair World salon, a stylist who worked there and a customer - were all Korean women, according to reports by ABC affiliate WFAA. They were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening wounds.
The unidentified suspect was dressed in black when he walked into the salon and began shooting on Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas Police Department said. The shooter then drove away in a maroon minivan.
While authorities said they did not know the motive behind the gunfire, the incident recalled the shooting of eight people in Atlanta-area massage spas, six of whom were Asian or Asian-American women. Police said they had no evidence that the shooting was a hate crime but stressed the investigation was in its early stages.
Those attacks heightened fears in Asian communities of violence inspired by anti-immigrant or anti-Asian sentiment, which has escalated in recent years, in part because of the perception that China was responsible for triggering the worldwide pandemic.
The statement from the Dallas police did not say how many shots were fired by the gunman.
Law enforcement circulated images from the scene that showed a person wearing black and carrying a large rifle while appearing to run out of a parking lot.
A police spokesperson said there was no update on Thursday on the condition of the three women who were shot.
The Korean-American community in the Dallas area ranks among the largest in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, and Koreatown is the historic hub of the area's Asian and Asian-American residents.