Three people died in a shooting at a university graduation ceremony in the Philippines' capital region on Sunday, including a former mayor from the volatile south of the country, police said, Reuters reported.

Local Quezon City police chief Remus Medina said the shooting appeared to have been an assassination of the former mayor of the southern Lamitan city, Rose Furigay.

The suspect, wounded in a shootout with a campus security officer and arrested after a car chase, was now in custody and being interrogated, Medina told reporters.

Furigay was shot as she was about to attend the graduation of her daughter at the law school of Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country's most prestigious, Medina said.

The two others killed were a campus security officer and an unidentified male, the police said.