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BLACKSBURG, Virginia - Students expressed disgust and disbelief at photos and a rage-filled video diatribe sent to a television network by the gunman who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech university.
Cho Seung-Hui paused during the bloodbath to post a package with photos of himself brandishing weapons and a video of a hateful, rambling manifesto.
"You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option," Cho said in the video portion of the package that broadcaster NBC News received and turned over to the FBI.
Half-a-dozen Virginia Tech students gathered silently around a bank of televisions in the student centre to watch images of Cho.
"That's crazy. He kills two people and then goes to the post office and then he's ready for round two? It's creepy," said graduate student Nick Jeremiah, 34.
"He just goes on and on -- that's got to be more than he's spoken, ever," Jeremiah said. "I thought, 'well, he does talk.'"
Fronting the NBC website was a picture of the black-gloved gunman staring menacingly into the camera as he wielded the two handguns he apparently used in the shooting spree, the deadliest in modern US history.
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," Cho says on one of the videos, according to NBC.
"But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
The bizarre new twist added to an already chilling portrait of Cho, who after the killings took his own life on the sprawling rural campus in south-western Virginia.
NBC said the package received at its New York headquarters bore a postal service time stamp that showed it was mailed sometime between Cho's killing of two people in a dormitory and his attack two hours later on a classroom building where he cut down 30 more people.
"This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation," said Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police. But he gave no details.
Video
Among the material was a video showing Cho talking about his hatred of the rich, and a dense, 1,800-word diatribe laced with profanity and expressing a desire to get even, the network said.
"Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless people," Cho said, adding: "When the time came I did it. I had to."
Some of the 43 photos Cho took of himself showed him posing with his weapons and clad in a dark vest in which he carried the ammunition clips he used to shoot his victims one by one. Witnesses said he stopped only to reload.
Other pictures showed him smiling into the camera. One photograph shows bullets displayed in what appeared to be an almost artful arrangement, NBC said.
NBC said it could not be established when the video was made and it was unclear whether he took the pictures himself.
The text mentioned "martyrs like Eric and Dylan," an apparent reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre outside Denver in which 12 students and a teacher were killed and whose eighth anniversary falls on Friday.
NBC News President Steve Capus was quoted as saying while the package did not include any images of the shootings themselves, it did contain "vague references."
Mental problems
The disclosure followed word from university police that Cho had been accused of stalking women students and was taken to a psychiatric hospital in 2005 because of worries he was suicidal.
A Virginia court order issued at the time declared him "mentally ill" and said he presented "an imminent danger to self or others," ABC News reported.
The diatribe appeared to fit an already chilling portrait from roommates and teachers who described Cho as a disturbed loner whose creative writings for his English literature degree were so laced with violence and venom that they alarmed some people around him.
"Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and impaled upon the cross?" Cho said.
"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats? Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs? Your trust fund wasn't enough? Your vodka and cognac weren't enough? All your debaucheries weren't enough? Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs? You had everything."
Devin Cornwall, 19, who watched the video in a dormitory room with two friends, said the gunman's hatred for rich children made no sense.
"To me, that doesn't personify any Tech student I know. I always think of us as a blue-collar place," Cornwall said.
University Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said his officers confronted Cho in late 2005 after two women complained separately that he had harassed them in person, through phone calls and with instant messages.
"I'm not saying they were threats; I'm saying they were annoying," Flinchum told a news conference at the campus.
After the second incident in December 2005, Cho's roommate warned police he might be suicidal, prompting them to issue a "temporary detention order" and send him to a nearby mental health facility for evaluation, Flinchum said.
Officials would not say how long Cho stayed at the facility, but roommates said he was gone for a couple of days. The women declined to file charges against Cho. Neither was among his victims on Monday, police said.
Despite encounters with the law and his past psychiatric treatment, Cho was able to legally purchase the two handguns he used in the attack. The shooting has rekindled debate over US gun laws, the most lenient in the Western world.
News of Cho's past contacts with police and mental health specialists added to accounts of his erratic behaviour, raising questions whether anyone could have picked up warning signs.
Cho immigrated from South Korea to the United States with his family in 1992 and was raised in Virginia outside Washington, D.C. Some South Korean officials feared a backlash against the large Korean community in the United States.
- REUTERS
