CHICAGO (AP) — A man who was recently fired from his job at Navy Pier returned to the Chicago tourist attraction and killed two workers before fleeing, police said.

The attack happened Tuesday afternoon after the fired worker gained access to an office space near a loading dock at Navy Pier, police Chief of Patrol Jon Hein told reporters.

The assailant shot Lamont Johnson, 51, and an unidentified 47-year-old man before fleeing, police said. The victims were pronounced dead at a hospital.

Police declined to name the alleged attacker Wednesday, citing a department policy of not naming people until they are charged, and didn’t say whether they think he poses a danger to the public. It wasn’t immediately clear why police didn’t know the name of one of the killed workers but did know his age.

The suspect was fired on Oct. 14 from his job at Navy Pier. which features shops, restaurants, entertainment and its iconic Ferris wheel along Lake Michigan.

“As a former employer of the subcontractor, he had access,” Brian Murphy, Navy Pier’s chief operating officer, told WLS-TV. “He knew how to get to that back loading dock area.”

The site was put on lockdown after the shootings and an alert was sent to people who live nearby, Murphy said.

Stephanie Knowles, who works at a souvenir shop, said her manager received a call and told employees they had to “start closing everything down.”

Workers turned off the lights and hid in the back of a storage room, Knowles said.

“I was a little nervous, you know, when you think about the high school shootings,” she said. “I’ve never had to live through that, so this was the closest thing that I’ve had to that experience.”

Labour Minister Mustafa Bayram says 4,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the September attacks.

Lebanon has filed a complaint against Israel with the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) over a string of deadly attacks involving exploding pagers in September.

Lebanese Labour Minister Mustafa Bayram filed the formal complaint at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, he said the attack was an “egregious war against humanity, against technology, against work”.

“It’s a very dangerous precedent if not condemned,” he said of the attacks, which Lebanon says killed and injured workers.

“We are in a situation where ordinary objects – objects used in daily life – become dangerous and lethal.”

The explosions on September 23 were purportedly aimed at targeting the Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon that used the devices to communicate.

The attack was widely blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied the allegation. Bayram said it was “widely accepted internationally … that Israel was behind this heinous act”.

The minister added that the casualty count was even higher than first reported, explaining that “more than 4,000 civilians fell – between martyrs and injured and maimed – in a few minutes by this attack.”

‘Contrary to decent work principles’

During a press conference in Geneva, Bayram was asked why he opted to file the complaint at the ILO, to which he replied that the workers who were harmed in the explosions were on the job.

“We deemed it necessary to point out that this runs contrary to work environment, security and safety, contrary to decent work principles … defended by the ILO,” he said.

He added that the Lebanese authorities could still file complaints about pager attacks in other international forums, including the World Trade Organization (WTO).

With the attack on the pagers in September, Israel began a more intense war on Lebanon.

Hezbollah and the Israeli army had already been trading attacks since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

A week after the pager attack, Israel announced a ground operation in southern Lebanon as well as heavy air strikes on areas in Beirut’s southern suburbs and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

So far, more than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon and 13,492 injured since last October, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health.

More than a million people have also been displaced due to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

In the latest attacks on Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least 30 people in Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, according to the regional governor, while more strikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs.