Gunman in Virginia Tech shootings sent material to NBC

Source: Xinhuanet | 04-19-2007 08:54

This video frame grab image taken from a video aired by NBC News on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 shows Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui. The video was part of a package allegedly mailed to the network on Monday, April 16 between Cho's first and second shootings on the Virginia Tech campus. [AP/NBC]

The gunman in Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech sent material to NBC News between the first and second shooting incidents that together killed 33 people, including the gunman himself, police said Wednesday.

"Earlier today, NBC News in New York received correspondence that we believe to have been from Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman responsible for the fatal shootings in Norris Hall," Steve Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police, said at a news conference at Virginia Tech, located in Blacksburg, in the southwest of Virginia.

NBC immediately notified authorities after it received the material Wednesday, he said.

The material might be "a very new, critical component" of the investigation, he said.

"We're in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth," he said.

The material in the package was said to contain digital images of the gunman holding weapons and reading a manifesto declaring that he wanted to get even with rich people.

A total of 33 people, including the gunman, were killed in Virginia Tech Monday morning, in what had become the deadliest campus shooting incident in U.S. history, and police had identified the gunman as 23-year-old South Korean native Cho Seung-Hui, a senor majoring in English at the state university.