A lone gunman dressed in black killed five people, including four in a crowded shopping mall, before returning home and taking his own life on Thursday. It was the third such massacre in Finland in about two years, and once again raised questions about gun control in a Nordic country where hunting is popular.

Police identified the killer as 43-year-old Ibrahim Shkupolli, an ethnic Albanian immigrant from Kosovo who had been living for several years in Finland, and the national tragedy cast a pall over the nation's New Year's Eve celebrations.

Shkupolli killed his ex-girlfriend, a Finnish woman, at her home, and four employees of the Prisma grocery store at the Sello shopping mall in Espoo, six miles (10 kilometers) west of Helsinki, the capital.

It was unclear whom he shot first.

The former girlfriend, who was 42, had also worked at the same Prisma store, and police superintendent Jukka Kaski said she had a restraining order imposed on Shkupolli.

The Finnish newspaper, Aamulehti, wrote that Shkupolli allegedly stalked the woman for years and that she had complained to police about how he used to show up at the Prisma grocery store to watch her.

National Police Commissioner Mikko Paatero told the Aamulehti daily that it was unlikely the gunman had targeted specific Prisma employees but that police didn't know for sure.

After killing the four mall workers, the gunman fled the area and was at large for several hours. Police eventually found his body at his Espoo home, and Kaski said the cause of death was suicide.

Relatives in the Kosovo town of Mitrovica, where Ibrahim Shkupolli was born, expressed shock and grief at the news.

"Each time he came from Finland he came here," said cousin Islam Shkupolli, his eyes red from crying. "I am very surprised by what has happened. I knew him to be a very kind man," he said.

Relatives said Shkupolli had last visited in Kosovo in November.

"I can't say a bad word about him, and I know no one else can," said sister-in-law Nexhmije while standing on the porch of her home in Mitrovica, Kosovo. "There are no festivities for us tonight."

Back in Espoo _ Finland's second largest city and known as the home of Nokia, the world's largest manufacturer of cell phones _ the day started in chaos. Witnesses said panic erupted at the mall when the shots rang out.

"I heard two shots," eyewitness Mare Elson told state broadcaster YLE. "First I thought somebody had shot firecrackers inside the mall. But then I saw a man dressed in black running beside me with a gun in his hand."