Cho Seung-Hui fired more than 170 bullets in nine minutes in his murder rampage in the university classroom building where he killed 30 on April 16, police said on Wednesday.
WASHINGTON: Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui fired more than 170 bullets in nine minutes in his murder rampage in the university classroom building where he killed 30 on April 16, police said on Wednesday.
Virginia state police superintendent Steven Flaherty told a press conference in Blacksburg, Virginia that ballistics reports and other evidence also tied Cho to two students shot death earlier that morning at a dormitory, but that police still had not found any personal ties.
"Cho's shooting rampage inside Norris Hall lasted about nine minutes," Flaherty said.
South Korea-born, US-raised English major Cho, 23, killed a total of 27 students and five faculty members and wounded more than 20 others in the deadliest US school shooting spree last week.
Last week hospital and Virginia medical examiner's office officials told media that Cho's victims each had three or more bullet wounds in them.
Police also said they "don't have any evidence" for Cho's specific motives for the massacre aside from the rambling, hate-filled writings, photographs and videotaped statements that he mailed to NBC television from a Blacksburg post office between the first shootings around 7:00 am on April 16 and the second shootings, about two and a half hours later.
However, Flaherty said that police had concluded that Cho recorded all of the video and made the photographs prior to the first shootings in the West Ambler Johnston dormitory on the campus.
Police also said that ballistic tests on a nine-millimeter handgun, one of two found by Cho's body after he killed himself at the end of his rampage, showed it was used both in the dormitory killings and those in the Norris Hall classroom building later in the morning.
Despite witnesses having seen Cho outside the dormitory just prior to the shooting of female student Emily Hilscher and dormitory advisor Ryan Clark that morning, police were reticent to declare categorically that Cho had killed them.
They are also still trying to understand why Hilscher was apparently Cho's first victim.
"We are still trying to figure out what he did or did not do" inside West Ambler Johnston, campus police chief Wendell Flinchum said at the press conference.
Flaherty also explained why police had not locked down the campus after the first shooting that morning, an issue that drew criticisms of the university from students.
He said that after Hilscher and Clark were discovered dead, police quickly focused on a likely suspect and, after putting out an alert they soon found and began interrogating the person -- whom he declined to identify.
Questions have been raised about how Cho, a loner who was raised in Centreville, Virginia, was able to obtain the two handguns and ammunition used in the massacre despite his record of mental illness.
University professors had noted his extreme anti-social behaviour and violent leanings, and he had been held by police in 2005 as mentally unstable and a threat to himself before being released with an order to see a mental health counselor.
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