Virginia Tech shooting rampage leaves 33 dead

At least 33 people died at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. Va., yesterday in the deadliest gun rampage in modern U.S. history, officials said.

The massacre took place in two locations — a dormitory, where two people were killed, and two hours later in an engineering building across campus. Officials said they knew of only one shooter, but were still investigating whether the same gunman was involved in both incidents.

“Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions,” university President Charles Steger said at a nationally televised news conference. “The university is shocked and indeed horrified.”

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell R. Flinchum said no immediate identification of the gunman was available.

There was criticism throughout the day that the university should have closed down between the incidents, but Steger defended the school’s actions.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” Steger said at the afternoon briefing. “We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.”

The magnitude of the horror grew as the death toll climbed to 33, including the shooter. Dozens of people were initially reported injured, at least four critically.

At the news conference, Steger said 15 were in hospitals. The injuries included gunshot wounds but also broken bones and sprains sustained by students who jumped from windows to escape the attacker.

As authorities probed the incident, the number of questions also grew. There were reports that the gunman could have been a student or a former student who initially got into an argument with a former girlfriend.

Karina Porushkevich, 18, a freshman from Calabasas, Calif., said she and others were told by friends that the gunman was apparently a spurned boyfriend.

The gunman reportedly had been screaming at his girlfriend on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, the dorm, when the resident assistant came by, Porushkevich said she and other students were told.

After the fatal shooting at the dorm, the next shooting incident took place two hours later at the Norris science and engineering building.

The incident began shortly after 7:15 a.m. EDT at the 2,600-acre campus, about 250 miles southwest of Washington.

Michael O’Brien, a sophomore studying industrial engineering, said he received an e-mail about the first shooting, but since school was open he continued to a class at Norris just as the second shooting began.

“I saw people standing still looking across the drill field. That was very unusual,” O’Brien said. “I could tell something was wrong. But it didn’t really register with me with the earlier e-mail. Then I heard a gunshot. I saw students rushing out of Norris Hall, being directed by police officers where to go.”

He said he hurried back to his dorm and from there could see Norris Hall from his window.

An amateur video taken by a student from a cell phone showed several officers first hesitating outside Norris, then positioning themselves behind a tree, and finally rushing inside the building — all the while as repeated shots could be heard from inside.

Laura Spaventa, a sophomore media student, described the horror of sitting in class hearing gunshots outside.

“We were in class and got an e-mail about the first shootings but classes kept going,” she said. “And then we got another e-mail saying to stay where we were, that there was a shooter on the loose. Then we heard five shots. My teacher shut the blinds and locked the door and we all got away from the windows and under the desks. And we started calling our family and friends on our cell phones to tell them we were OK.”

According to Derek O’Dell, a student interviewed by MSNBC, the gunman was in his 20s and was wearing a black leather jacket.

O’Dell said he was inside a classroom in Norris when the gunman entered and began shooting. O’Dell said he was wounded in the arm.

“He came into the room and started shooting,” O’Dell said. “He let off a full round. I was one of 10 to 15 people in our classroom to get shot. He didn’t say anything, he just started shooting.”

Previously, the most deadly U.S. campus shooting was in 1966 at the University of Texas where Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire. He killed 16 people before he was gunned down by police. Thirty-one were wounded.

The most notorious high school shooting was at Columbine near Littleton, Colo., in 1999. Two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine was in Tokyo on a trade mission but canceled his plans to return. “It is difficult to comprehend senseless violence on this scale,” he said in a statement.

Sudan agrees to allow U.N. forces into Darfur

Diplomats reacted with cautious optimism yesterday to Sudan’s grudging agreement to allow U.N. attack helicopters and 3,000 international peacekeepers into Darfur to protect civilians caught in the conflict there.

“We’ve been down this path before,” U.S. ambassador Alejandro Wolff said. “So we will see if it happens when it happens.”

Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, had backtracked several times on a November agreement with the U.N. to bolster the under-equipped and overwhelmed African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. Bashir had insisted that the deployment of outside troops without the government’s consent amounted to violation of Sudan’s sovereignty.

But the threat of Security Council sanctions, combined with diplomatic pressure from the U.N., United States and Sudan’s ally China, seemed to prod Bashir to accept the original pact. China’s assistant foreign minister visited Khartoum last week to press the government to accept U.N. peacekeepers, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte ended a three-day mission there yesterday.

More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2 million have been displaced since a rebellion began in 2003. The government is accused of responding to the uprising by arming Arab militias, known as janjaweed, to attack civilian populations and rival non-Arab tribes.

The government had allowed in a small number of advisers, fulfilling the first part of a three-phase plan that would culminate in a combined force of 20,000 peacekeepers from the African Union and U.N. But Bashir had balked at any more troops or equipment.

Yesterday, he agreed to a “heavy support package” including as many as 3,000 police and military personnel to protect displaced people living in camps from further attacks. Most importantly, he consented to six attack helicopters that he had previously rejected.

The support package is meant to pave the way for the final phase of the 20,000-strong hybrid force.

Committee postpones Gonzales testimony

The Senate Judiciary Committee canceled testimony scheduled for today from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales after concluding that the hearing would be inappropriate in the wake of yesterday’s mass slaying at Virginia Tech.

Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT.), said he postponed the hearing, which will focus on the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys, until Thursday after conferring with Gonzales and the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (PA).

“I’m sure that he will want to be dealing with the matters of the shooting,” Leahy said of Gonzales.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said: “The attorney general would like to testify as soon as possible. But out of respect for the family members impacted by this horrific tragedy he will defer to the chairman’s judgment on when to hold the hearing.”

Gonzales has been preparing intensively for his committee appearance, which is viewed by Democrats and Republicans alike as a make-or-break performance for the embattled attorney general. A half-dozen Republicans have joined numerous Democrats in calling for Gonzales to resign over how the firing of the federal prosecutors was handled.

Gonzales plans to concede that the dismissals were mishandled but will continue to argue that he did not have substantial involvement in carrying them out, according to his prepared testimony.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday showed that two-thirds of Americans, including a narrow majority of Republicans, see political motivations behind the prosecutor firings. Nearly six in 10 disapproved of the way Gonzales has handled the issue, including nearly half of Republicans.

But the poll suggests that the nation is divided along partisan lines about whether Gonzales should step down. Forty-five percent of Americans said Gonzales should lose his job, 39 percent said he should remain in his post, and 16 percent expressed no opinion.

Eight U.S. attorneys were fired last year as part of a plan that originated in the White House to replace some prosecutors based in part on their perceived disloyalty to President Bush and his policies. The uproar over the matter has grown in part because of statements by Gonzales that conflict with information in e-mails and other internal Justice Department documents.