Gunman was a student, says University president

Virginia Tech’s president said today that a university student was the gunman in at least the second of the two campus attacks that claimed 33 lives yesterday.

Though he did not explicitly say the student was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter.

It is believed that the gunman killed two people at a dormitory yesterday 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 Charles Steger in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.

Steger also defended the delay in warning students about the gunman.

Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9.26am. By then the second shooting had begun.

Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in.