Virginia Tech lockdown lifted after gun alert
The university issued an alert on its website at 9.37am (12.37pm Irish time) telling students and employees to stay inside and lock their doors.
University spokesman Larry Hincker said later in the morning that the campus alert remained in effect and that people should stay indoors until further notice.
The university posted the alert on its website and its official Twitter account. he university sounded its emergency sirens and issued an emergency alert by phone and email.
The campus-wide alert was later lifted and students and staff were told to resume their normal activities, according to an email sent at 2.42pm.
The email said there would be a large police presence on campus throughout the day.
The children told police they saw the man quickly walking toward the volleyball courts, carrying what might have been a handgun covered by some type of cloth.
Police swarmed the area but said they could not find a gunman matching their description. Officials said they were looking for a six-foot-tall white man with light brown hair wearing a blue and white striped shirt, grey shorts and brown sandals. He was described as clean shaven.
The gunman was reported near Dietrick Hall, a dining facility steps away from the dorm where the first shootings took place in 2007.
Federal authorities fined the school in March after ruling that administrators violated campus safety law by waiting too long to notify staff and students about a potential threat after two students were shot dead on April 16, 2007, in West Ambler Johnston Hall. An email alert went out more than two hours later that day, about the time a student from South Korea, Seung-Hui Cho, was chaining shut the doors to a building where he killed 30 people and himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
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