Virginia Tech pays respects to victims, gunman

Students at Virginia Tech university prepared for funerals yesterday for nearly a dozen shooting victims and extended a note of forgiveness to the gunman who killed 32 people on campus.

A small tribute to Seung-Hui Cho, who shot his victims then himself on Monday, has been added to a growing memorial of stones in the centre of the sprawling university in southwest Virginia.

"I just wanted you to know that I am not mad at you. I don't hate you," read a note among flowers at a stone marker labeled for Cho. "I am so sorry that you could find no help or comfort."

The note, one of three expressing sorrow and sympathy for the gunman, a mentally disturbed English major, was signed "With all my love, Laura." A purple candle burned and a small American flag stood in the ground nearby.

Other memorial stones were decorated with objects including flags from Canada, Peru, and Israel for victims who came from those countries. Nearly a dozen funerals and services for victims were planned yesterday in Blacksburg and across the United States.

Mourners wearing the school's orange and maroon colors wandered the campus, adding flowers and scrawling messages of grief on makeshift memorials on the university grounds.

Graduate student Chris Chabalko, 29, said adding a stone memorial for Cho: "He was a student. Thirty-three people died," Chabalko said. "There's nothing anyone can do about it now. We've got to remember them equally."

Cho's family issued a heartbroken apology on Friday for the actions of the 23-year-old, who moved to Virginia with his family from South Korea when he was a child. "He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare," the family said in a statement. (The order of Cho's name has been changed in line with his family's practice. He had been previously identified by police and university officials as Cho Seung-Hui.)

Questions remained about how Cho, who had been investigated after stalking complaints in 2005 and treated for mental illness, was able to buy the two guns he used in the rampage. Under federal law, Cho should have been barred from buying a gun, but wording differences with a Virginia law allowed him to legally get a weapon, a state law professor said.

"A person who has been found in a commitment proceeding to be a danger to himself and committed to out-patient care ... is disqualified from purchasing a firearm under federal law," Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia's Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, told Reuters.

But under state law, he said, the prohibition only appears to extend to people who have been committed to a hospital, which Cho was not. As a result, his details would not have been captured by an FBI background check system used by gun sellers.

The United States remained jittery following several security scares, and a hostage-taking at NASA in Texas on Friday that left two people dead. Authorities in Minnesota said a US veteran of the Iraq war was hospitalized after two pipe bombs were found in a pickup truck on Friday at a college in New Ulm.

The discovery on Friday prompted a brief evacuation of the Martin Luther College campus, while the bombs were removed. The bombs did not appear related to the Virginia Tech shootings, New Ulm police Sergeant Steve Depew said.

First lady Laura Bush said in an interview with Fox New Channel scheduled to air yesterday that despite the pain of the shootings, "Virginia Tech will be able to move on from it, and there will be a day there where everyone won't think every moment about their loss. But it's tough."