A GUNMAN OPENED fire at a birthday party in the US state of Colorado, shooting dead six adults before killing himself.

The shooting happened just after midnight on Sunday in a mobile home park on the east side of Colorado Springs, police said.

Officers arrived at a trailer to find six dead adults and a man with serious injuries who died later at a hospital, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported.

The suspected shooter was the boyfriend of a female victim at the party attended by friends, family and children.

He walked inside and opened fire before shooting himself, police said. Children at the attack were not hurt and were placed with relatives.

The birthday party was for one of the people killed, police said.

Police on Sunday had not released the identities of the shooter or victims. Authorities say a motive was not immediately known.

“My heart breaks for the families who have lost someone they love and for the children who have lost their parents,” Colorado Springs Police Chief Vince Niski said in a statement.

It was Colorado’s worst mass shooting since a gunman killed 10 people at a Boulder supermarket on 22 March this year.

“The tragic shooting in Colorado Springs is devastating,” Gov Jared Polis said, “especially as many of us are spending the day celebrating the women in our lives who have made us the people we are today”.

Colorado Springs, population 465,000, is Colorado’s second-biggest city after Denver.

In 2015, a man shot three people to death at random before dying in a shootout with police in Colorado Springs on Halloween.

Less than a month later, a man killed three people, including a police officer, and injured eight others in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city.