Virginia Tech Police informed the Tech community of several recent threats made against the university and individual students in an e-mail last Wednesday.
Since Friday, March 5, YouTube postings that made “numerous threats against the Tech community,” according to the e-mail, were noticed on the Web site. These threats allegedly referenced the April 16, 2007 shootings and shooter Seung-Hui Cho. Tech Police believe the same user made multiple accounts on the Web site to harass the Tech community. The person’s posts originated in Italy.
In Wednesday’s e-mail, Tech Police said it is “confident” these postings are from the same user who posted similar threats in late October.
In October, a YouTube account called NextKillerVirgTech showed in its commenting history a series of comments on various videos pertaining to Tech, including footage of Cho. YouTube has since deleted that account.
Wednesday’s e-mail said YouTube officials are working to delete the accounts from which the most recent threats have originated.
Additionally, on Tuesday, March 9, four separate Tech students received threatening and harassing e-mails, some of which contained personal, but not confidential, information about those students. According to the Tech Police e-mail, all students who received these e-mails had been previously identified in news reports following last October’s YouTube threat incident.
These e-mails appeared to be sent from a fictitious Tech e-mail account with a username that referenced Cho.
Currently, the e-mail states, “law enforcement authorities do not consider these posts or emails to constitute a threat to the university.” However, Tech Police is working with the FBI and Italian law enforcement to discover the nature of the threats.
A person claiming to be this user attempted to contact the Collegiate Times Thursday morning.
The sender confirms the posts originate from Italy and that "im not sad for my work and insults the vt community."
The sender stated in the e-mail they made the posts because "im only a sad guy."
The Collegiate Times since then has turned the e-mail over to police.
Tech Police continue to investigate the situation. Police recommended students to stay away from threatening social networking posts and avoid responding to such threats.
University spokesman Mark Owczarski said yesterday that there were no substantial updates to the case. “The investigation continues,” he said, in tandem with international and state law enforcement authorities.
Tech is not the only school that has experienced serious threats of violence from the Internet recently. Last week, all public city schools in Minneapolis were locked down for two days after a threat made on an unidentified social networking Web site was proved not to be substantial. Authorities have traced those posts to computer servers in Australia.