An employee walked into a meat-processing plant in Kansas on Friday and opened fire with handguns, shooting four other workers to death and then killing himself, local police said. The shooting took place at a plant in Kansas City, Kansas, operated by ConAgra Foods Inc., one of the largest U.S. food and agribusiness companies. The identities of the gunman and victims were not immediately released. Three other people were injured, one of them critically, and taken to local hospitals, police said. Police said the shootings happened about 5 p.m. CDT (2200 GMT). The motive for the killings had not been determined. But the Kansas City Star newspaper said plant workers recognized the shooter as someone who had worked at the plant, been laid off and recently brought back. The dead were men ages 46, 45, 49, 21 and 23, according to Police Col. Sam Breshears. Police would not say which of the five dead was believed to be the shooter. The man who was critically wounded was 55 years old. Two other men, aged 44 and 60, were in stable condition. The deaths were the latest in a string of workplace shootings in the United States in recent years. In August 2003, Salvador Tapia returned to the Windy City Core Supply warehouse in Chicago where he was fired six months before and killed six former co-workers. Tapia was shot and killed in a gun battle with police. A month earlier in July 2003, a Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. worker in Meridian, Mississippi, left a company ethics seminar, retrieved a rifle and shotgun and returned to work, killing six co-workers and wounding eight others before committing suicide. In February 2003, Emanuel Burl Patterson allegedly opened fire at Labor Ready Inc., a temporary employment service in Huntsville, Alabama, killing four fellow job-seekers and wounding a fifth. In February 2001, William Baker killed four others, and then himself, at a Navistar International engine plant in suburban Chicago. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Exterior view of the ConAgra Foods Inc. plant in Kansas City, Kansas where a fatal shooting occurred, July 2, 2004. (REUTERS)