TOKYO An 18-year-old Japanese soldier was arrested on Wednesday after two people were killed and one injured in a shooting at a military facility in central Japan, the country's defence ministry said.

The Self-Defence Force (SDF) member is accused of shooting three people with an automatic weapon at a military shooting range in Gifu City about 9 a.m., the defence ministry said. All three were taken to a hospital, the defence ministry said, and two died of their injuries.

Ground SDF Chief of Staff General Yasunori Morishita told reporters that the man accused of the shooting joined the service in April and that the victims were instructors. Police will conduct an inquiry, he said.

"We will investigate the cause of the incident to ensure that it doesn't happen again," Morishita said at a media briefing.

The victims included a man in his 50s and two in their 20s, and there were no reports of civilian casualties, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Shootings are extremely rare in Japan, where gun ownership is tightly regulated and anyone seeking to own a gun must go through a rigorous vetting process.

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed with a homemade gun in July. The suspect previously worked in the Maritime SDF.

The SDF was dealt a blow in April when a helicopter crashed with 10 crew members on board in the sea off of the southern prefecture of Okinawa.

(This story has been refiled to remove the extraneous "and" from paragraph 1)

(Reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama, Tim Kelly, and Rocky Swift; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim, Christian Schmollinger and Michael Perry)