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OTTAWA — The normally bustling streets near Canada’s Parliament were transformed Wednesday as thousands of government workers were kept inside their buildings for hours while police and military officers in combat gear swept the area, fearful that shootings that morning had been part of a larger plot.

Anxious workers pressed their faces against the windows of nearby offices, trying to figure out what had happened in a city so peaceful that pedestrians can usually walk unimpeded into the Parliament building before being checked by guards.

“I never thought this would happen,” said one woman, who refused to give her name as she hurried along a main street after the police allowed people in her building to evacuate in the afternoon. “This is Canada.”

A Twitter posting from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said that Ottawa’s mayor, Jim Watson, had noted that the killing of a young guard at the National War Memorial was only the fifth murder in Ottawa, a city of about 885,000 people, this year.

On most mornings, the streets on Parliament Hill are filled with workers grabbing coffee and doing errands between the many government offices. But for most of Wednesday, the streets were eerily silent except for occasional bursts of intense police activity.

The police ordered businesses to shut down, and signs taped on shop windows and building doors said they were closed for the public’s protection. Some office workers, confused about how to proceed, clustered near the front doors of their buildings, hoping to get cellphone signals.

At one point in the afternoon, a line of about a dozen police in paramilitary gear, rifles at the ready, charged up Metcalfe Street, leaving the security perimeter to sweep the area in front of the nearby Marriott hotel. Onlookers scrambled as the police shouted to stand aside. A pregnant woman who had fainted during the initial charge was helped inside a nearby coffee shop that had stayed open even as nearby stores closed.

“Whoever did this wants us to shut down, but people need us, so I stayed open,” said the owner, Khoder Ibrahim. He said three women with babies had taken shelter inside the shop.

“It was very frightening,” a government worker said of the four hours she was kept in lockdown. She would identify herself only as Helen. “We heard sirens and knew something bad was happening.”