US:Stung by a backlash from victims' families and police, US television networks have promised to limit the airing of a video recorded by Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech university on Monday.
Fox News said it would stop broadcasting the material and NBC, to whom Cho posted the package of multi-media material, said it would limit the number of times it airs the images.
A number of victims' relatives cancelled scheduled appearances on NBC yesterday and Virginia state police superintendent Steve Flaherty said he was disappointed that the network showed the video. "I just hate that a lot of people not used to seeing that type of image had to see it."
Cho posted the package, which included photographs, QuickTime video files and an 18,000-word statement, after the first shootings on Monday but before his second more deadly attack on classrooms.
In the statement, which is often incoherent and laced with obscenities, Cho expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even with unnamed figures whose wealth and privilege he condemns. "You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything."
The statement mentions "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" - apparently a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, eight years ago today. Cho says in the video that he did "this . . . for my children, for my brothers and sisters" but he also speaks about the misery he has suffered.
"You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless people."
Some of Cho's former high school classmates yesterday recalled that he had been teased on account of his shyness and the accent he retained from the first eight years of his life that he spent in South Korea.
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who graduated with Cho from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, said that in an English class, the teacher had the students read aloud and, when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence. After the teacher threatened to give him a failing grade for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth", Mr Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China'."
Virginia governor Tim Kaine said yesterday he was taking charge of an investigation into why Virginia Tech failed to take action to stop Cho, who was known to have mental problems, before he killed.
Schools in Yuba City, California, were ordered into a "lockdown" yesterday after the county sheriff warned that a man had threatened to go on a killing spree in locals schools.
The Sutter County sheriff's department said it had been warned that Jeffrey Thomas Carney intended to make the mass slaying at Virginia Tech "look mild" and that he had said he was armed with an AK-47 rifle, improvised explosive devices and poison, and he would seek to provoke a confrontation with police to "commit suicide-by- cop". Yuba City is north of the state capital of Sacramento.
The sheriff's department described Mr Carney (28) as a transient and reportedly a methamphetamine abuser. - (Reuters)