Claims of cover-up in Virginia Tech shooting investigation

Families of Virginia Tech shooting victims reacted with fury after it emerged that the gunman's missing mental health records were found at the home of a former campus clinic chief more than two years after the incident.

The discovery has angered families struggling to understand how the killer fell through the cracks so disastrously.

The belated emergence of Seung-Hui Cho's file, a development disclosed in a memo obtained yesterday by The Associated Press, is another embarrassing lapse in the case and raises questions about how such potentially explosive evidence could be lost for so long.

"Deception comes to my mind in my first response," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was wounded. "It gives me the impression: 'What else are they hiding?'."

The contents of the file have not been made public and Virginia governor Tim Kaine said it was unclear why Dr Robert Miller, former director of the campus clinic where Cho was counselled because of his disturbing behaviour, took the records home more than a year before Cho killed 32 people and himself at the university in Blacksburg on April 16, 2007.

Because Dr Miller brought the file to his lawyer's attention and it was not found by police, its discovery calls into question the thoroughness of the criminal investigation and the findings of a commission appointed by the governor. The commission never interviewed Dr Miller.

Victims' families want to know whether the file contains warning signs that could have prevented America's deadliest shooting spree.

"Would things have been different if we had this information? What information is in those records?" asked Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was wounded in the shootings.

Dr Miller, 54, declined to comment when reached by telephone at his private practice.

State officials said they would release the records publicly as soon as possible, either by getting consent from Cho's estate or through a subpoena. The medical records are protected under state privacy laws.

Dr Miller told his lawyer about Cho's file last Thursday, said Mark Rubin, the governor's chief legal counsel. According to a university memo shared with victims' families, Dr Miller took the records for Cho and several other students home around the time he left his job at the centre in 2006.

After the massacre, the counselling centre conducted an exhaustive search for the records in 2007 and Dr Miller told investigators at the time that he did not know where they were, university spokesman Mark Owczarski said.

Virginia State Police are investigating whether a criminal act was committed, spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. Mr Kaine said it was illegal to remove records from the centre.

The families of two of the dead were already claiming that Dr Miller withheld troubling information about Cho. A lawsuit they filed in April claims Dr Miller was told by Cho's English professors about his disturbing behaviour and by the school's residential director that he had a history of erratic behaviour and suicidal thoughts and had "blades" in his room.

The lawsuit claims Dr Miller never passed that information on to either of the therapists from the counselling centre who dealt with Cho during three 45-minute triage sessions in 2005.

After the massacre, the panel criticised school officials for waiting two hours to warn students that Cho had killed two students in a dormitory. By the time the warning went out, Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building, where he killed 30 students and teachers before shooting himself as police closed in.

Some have also blamed the university for not responding more decisively to warning signs from Cho, including his increasingly sullen behaviour and twisted, violence-filled classroom writings. Cho also managed to buy two guns despite his history of mental illness.