A MAN has been shot dead after taking hostages at the Discovery Channel building in Washington DC, having demanded the channel broadcast its commitment "to save the planet".

The armed man took three people hostage at Discovery Communications headquarters before he was shot and killed by police, WJLA-TV reported.

Three hostages were released safely, but it was not immediately clear if any of them were injured.

Chief of Montgomery County Police J Thomas Manger announced at a press conference that the suspect had been shot by police and taken into custody. WJLA reported the news of the suspect's death after Manger addressed reporters.

It was not clear where WJLA was getting its information.

Police moved in on the man at approximately 4:45pm, almost four hours after the standoff began.

The suspect - identified by Fox News as James Jay Lee, an Asian male in his 40s - had entered the building shortly after 1pm wearing what was reported to be "a metallic canister on his front and back" and reportedly waved a handgun in the air.


According to various media reports, Lee had previously protested against the channel and was arrested for disorderly conduct in 2008.

Mr Manger added that operations were still underway to determine the safety of the building, where 1,900 employees work.

Almost all of the employees had been evacuated.

At least one of the hostages was a male security guard supervisor, according to local FOX affiliate WTTG.

Lee's brother-in-law Thomas Leonard told Fox News that Lee was capable of killing.

Asked by Fox News host Neil Cavuto if he thought his brother-in-law was capable of murder, Leonard replied: "God, I would think yes. Absolutely, he's gone this far."

Leonard, who said he has known Lee for 15 years, said he was not surprised by his actions.

"I'm not surprised, this is his desperate act to validate his own ego and opinion," Leonard said.

Asked if Lee was a suicide risk, Leonard replied in the affirmative, saying "I would think that before he would kill someone else."

Leonard added that he thought Lee had been incarcerated for a few years in either San Diego or Los Angeles.

His most recent actions were not the first time Lee had protested against the Discovery Channel.

Lee was ordered by a Maryland judge in 2008 to stay at least 500 feet from the Discovery building after his arrest during a protest there.

During his demonstration, Lee threw thousands of dollars in cash into the air to prove that "money means nothing."

He began his protest because he was upset that Discovery Channel programming did not place enough emphasis on saving the planet. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct.

On Lee's MySpace profile, he described himself as 43 years old, 5'11", and an atheist. He listed his hometown as "Hawaii," and under the children section, he wrote "I don't want kids." It wasn't clear when he had last updated his profile.

In a blog post on the social networking site from December 2006, Lee said that he had finished reading Al Gore's book "An Inconvenient Truth," calling it "very enlightening."

"The book was half good, which means the part about science was good. The rest seemed like a commercial for sainthood," he wrote.

Yesterday's incident began shortly after 1pm when police responded to reports of "shots fired." The initial reports of shots in the building have not been confirmed by authorities.

Nearly 100 children were evacuated safely from a day care center inside the building, some still in their cribs, to a nearby McDonalds. Other workers were told to take shelter in the locked offices on their floors, Fox News reported.

A motive was not immediately clear but WJLA said the Discovery Channel had been receiving threats related to the cable channel's program "Whale Wars," a show featuring a group of environmental activists who attack whaling ships.

One person inside the building tweeted a link to a website containing what appeared to be a rambling manifesto written by Lee that included a set of 11 demands for the cable channel.

It begins: " The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY," before listing the eleven demands.

At one point Lee, the purported author of the manifesto writes, "Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture."

The manifesto ends with the words, "These are the demands and sayings of Lee."

The list of demands was published on the website www.savetheplanet.com.

According to the Washington Post, the website is registered to Lee and was published on July 18. He listed a post office box in Canada as an address.