Hostage Crisis at Discovery Channel HQ in Silver Spring, Maryland

There is a hostage situation in progress Wednesday afternoon at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. The building has been evacuated and all streets in the area have been blocked off.

This story is updated here.

CNN is following the breaking news story at the present time, occurring in a densely populated suburb of Washington, DC. The Discovery Channel building is in the midst of a large commercial area, home to many corporate offices.

The building is L-shaped and houses hundreds of the Discovery network's employees as well as a children's day care center. At 2:30 pm EDT, law enforcement announced that it is unable to confirm that all employees were evacuated from the building, including the daycare site and they can't confirm or deny how many hostages might be trapped with the intruder.

Gunman Holding One or More Hostages at Discovery Channel HQ

The only facts known at the time of this writing are that there is one armed person, described as an Asian male, who has unknown objects either strapped to his body or within his immediate reach, that police believe are explosives of some sort. The person is also in possession of a revolver.

The Montgomery County SWAT team and emergency response teams have taken control of the physical area including the building and only they will or can be in contact with the person who caused this situation. A spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department said that their team is in contact with the suspect.

Twitter is ablaze with rumors and supposed eyewitness accounts of the scene and possible reasons behind the hostage taking. Take these with a grain of salt, of course, but there is one faction who claims that the hostage taker is Asian with a gripe about a recent series that is being broadcast on Animal Planet, one of the Discovery network's channels.

The program is called, "Whale Wars" and is an account of a team of people who board vessels off the coast of Antarctica to prevent illegal whaling activity. Most of the whaling teams are comprised of Japanese fisherman.

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