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By Zou Qi
AN erroneous US newspaper story about the Virginia Tech shootings has angered Chinese Internet users, incurred the wrath of the country's Foreign Ministry and brought death threats to an Asian student who was wrongly named as the killer.
The report that touched off the controversy was carried by the Chicago Sun-Times shortly after a gunman killed 32 people and himself on Monday at the university in the US state of Virginia. The newspaper, quoting unnamed authorities, said the killer was a Chinese man who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa issued in Shanghai.
Many Chinese news Websites cited the Sun-Times story, leading to headlines such as "Report: Gunman was Chinese national" and "Shanghai student eyed in university shooting."
Police later identified the gunman as a student from South Korea, 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui. The reaction from Chinese was swift - and it was angry.
A Shanghai native who now lives in the United States said in a note to the Sun-Times Website that he was "shocked to see the lack of professionalism and morality in finger-pointing a Chinese student from Shanghai as the murderer without any basis."
Chinese students in the US also began calling home to criticize the domestic news media that carried the Sun-Times report.
"We received several calls from Chinese students in America who expressed their dissatisfaction," said Yao Guang, who was staffing the complaint line yesterday at China's leading Web portal, Sina.com.
"They said they felt bad reading the reports headlined that a Chinese had done it. Our reports have now been updated with new information," he said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday it was a "terribly wrong move to give irresponsible reports before finding the truth," an act that violated the standards of journalism.
But the biggest victim of the erroneous report was a Virginia Tech University student named Wayne Chiang. Prior to the release of Cho's name, dozens of Internet users speculated on BBS Websites across China that Chiang was the killer.
The suspicions were triggered by Chiang's own blog. On Saturday, he posted dozens of photos of himself posing with the many rifles he owns, and he also said in one of his articles that he had just split up with his girlfriend.
After learning about the BBS postings - and before police released the gunman's identity - Chiang, who identified himself only as an Asian, wrote a new blog entry denying he was the killer.
"I have received numerous death threats, slanderous accusations, and my phone (credits have been used up) from the barrage of calls," he said. "This situation has spiraled out of control."
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