Policeman shot, two people stabbed in southwest Louisiana

Police stormed a grocery market in a southwestern Louisiana town on Wednesday to arrest a man accused of stabbing two people and shooting an officer before barricading himself inside the store, the St. Landry Parish sheriff said.

The suspect, who was not immediately identified, was captured after police fired tear gas into the building about an hour after the violence began in the small town of Sunset, about 70 miles (112 km) west of the state capital, Baton Rouge.

"The suspect is in custody," Sheriff Bobby Guidroz told reporters after the arrest, adding that bloodshed preceding the raid may have stemmed from a domestic dispute and that "there were probably drugs involved."

The conditions of the two stabbing victims and the officer who was shot were not immediately known, Guidroz said. "No one got hurt beyond what happened initially," he added.

The standoff began after the suspect allegedly stabbed and wounded two people inside a home, then shot and wounded a police officer arriving on the scene, the sheriff said. The accused gunman then fled in an automobile and drove about three blocks before crashing the vehicle into a JR Food Mart.

The grocery's owner, a customer and an employee who were inside the store, escaped, and the suspect holed up inside an inner office while police converged on the area and surrounded the building.

Officers fired volleys of tear gas into the building, then stormed inside to arrest the suspect, who "resisted" before he was subdued and taken into custody, the sheriff said.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing bySandra Maler and Peter Cooney)