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Varsity 'has blood on its hands'
17/04/2007 14:10 - (SA)
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| An unidentified student signs a memorial to the 32 slain on the campus of Virginia Tech University. (Chuck Burton, AP) |
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Blacksburg, Virginia - The gunman in the second of two campus attacks that claimed 33 lives was a student at the university, Virginia Tech's president said on Tuesday, also defending the school's delay in warning students about what became the deadliest shooting rampage in US history.
Though university president Charles Steger did not explicitly say the student, who he identified as an Asian male, was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter.
The gunman struck down two people at a dormitory on Monday before killing 30 more people at a campus building and finally killing himself with a shot to his head.
"We do know that he was an Asian male - this is the second incident - an Asian man who was a resident in one of our dormitories," said Steger in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.
Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 09:26. By then the second shooting had begun.
"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the seventh floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise co-ed dormitory where the shooting began and two people died.
Students kept confined to classrooms
Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in.
"We warned the students that we thought were immediately impacted," he told CNN. "We felt that confining them to the classroom was how to keep them safest."
He said investigators did not know there was a shooter loose on campus in the interval between the two shootings because the first could have been a murder-suicide.
Two students told NBC television's Today show they were unaware of the dorm shooting when they reported to a German class where the gunman later opened fire.
Derek O'Dell, his arm in a cast after being shot, described a shooter who fired away in "eerily silence" with "no specific target - just taking out anybody he could".
After the gunman left the room, students could hear him shooting other people down the hall. O'Dell said he and other students barricaded the door so the shooter couldn't get back in - though he later tried.
"After he couldn't get the door open he tried shooting it open... but the gunshots were blunted by the door," O'Dell said.
- AP
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