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By DAVID ESPO
AP Special Correspondent
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Police investigated reports of gunfire in a House office building on Friday and briefly sealed off the Capitol as a precaution.
Capitol police were investigating "the sound of gunfire in the garage level of the Rayburn House Office Building," said an announcement on the internal Capitol voice alarm system.
The Senate was in session at the time, but the House was not. Four ambulances were summoned. The FBI said there have been no injuries reported thus far.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., conducting a House Intelligence Committee hearing, interrupted a witness to request those attending the meeting to remain in the room and said the doors must be closed.
"It's a little unsettling to get a Blackberry message put in front of you that says there's gunfire in the building," he said.
There was no confirmation of gunfire.
"They said they heard gunfire in the Rayburn garage, but this is a huge building, I'm guessing it's a car backfiring or balloons popping," said Gene Smith, chief of staff to Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., who has an office in Rayburn.
The Rayburn House Office Building was completed in early 1965 and is the third of three office buildings constructed for the United States House of Representatives. It sits southwest of the Capitol. The building has four stories above ground, two basements, and three levels of underground garage space.
The U.S. Capitol Police Department's Containment & Emergency Response Team maintains an indoor shooting range in the basement of the Rayburn building, according to the department's Web site.
Within minutes of the reports, Rayburn halls were virtually empty and police were not allowing anyone to leave or take elevators or stairs to the garage.
The event occurred at the end of a week of unusually tumultuous series of events that ironically enough, began in the same building. FBI agents armed with a search warrant seized documents and computer material from the first office of Rep. William Jefferson in an weekend raid. Jefferson is at the center of a federal bribery investigation.
At the Capitol, police quickly closed all doors, stopping people from either entering the building. Tourists who were in the building were herded into a first-floor chamber in the middle of the building. Other corridors on the House side of the building, where lawmakers had already left for the Memorial Day recess, were deserted.
The Capitol was re-opened within an hour.
Jeff Connor, a spokesman for Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., said Capitol Hill police notified the office that gunfire was heard in the Rayburn building garage.
"They specifically said there was the sound of gunfire on one of the garage levels of the Rayburn House office building and asked staff to remain in their offices," Connor said.
Many members of the House were back home in their districts for the Memorial Day recess. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was home in Illinois when the incident began, an aide in his office said.
Incidents of violence inside the Capitol and its office buildings are rare.
On July 24, 1998, a man with a history of mental illness shot and killed Capitol Police officer Jacob J. Chestnut at a first-floor Capitol entrance. He then charged into an adjacent suite of offices occupied by Tom DeLay, then the House Republican whip, and exchanged fire with officer John Gibson, who also was killed. The gunman was wounded and captured.
In 1983, a late-night bomb, possibly set by someone protesting U.S. military action in Grenada and Lebanon, exploded just outside the Senate chamber. No one was injured.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
