THE attack with the kitchen knife was so savage that it left her head severed.

When the police arrived, murder suspect Zhu Haiyang was holding the decapitated head of victim Yang Xin in his hands, according a search warrant affidavit filed by the police.

'It was a horrific crime scene,' campus police chief Wendell Flinchum said of the attack. He said police found 'multiple edged weapons' in his backpack.

The murder took place on Wednesday night at Au Bon Pain cafe at the Graduate Life Center on the Virginia Tech campus.

This is the same campus that saw 32 people gunned down in 2007 by Korean student Cho Seung Hui who later shot himself.

Zhu, 25, is a PhD student in agricultural and applied economics there and Miss Yang, 22, who only arrived two weeks ago, was doing her Masters in accounting. Both are China nationals.

According to witnesses, Zhu and Miss Yang were seemingly doing nothing more than enjoying a quiet conversation and a cup of coffee together at a campus cafe when he abruptly pulled out a knife and attacked her, reported AFP.

Interviews with the seven witnesses, Capt Flinchum said, suggested Miss Yang and Zhu were not arguing before the knife came out.

Asked whether Zhu, who is from Ningbo in eastern China, said or yelled anything as he held the knife, Capt Flinchum declined to answer, saying investigators are withholding some information.

Miss Yang died near the table where she was attacked.

Capt Flinchum said Zhu had previously never been reported to campus police for any violations of the law.

Later that night, officials notified Miss Yang's mother in China of her death.

Miss Yang, from Beijing, had been a student at Virginia Tech for only 13 days, reported AP. But she had trusted Zhu enough to list him as an emergency contact on university documents.

So far, there there is no apparent motive for the attack.

But an unverified Chinese language blog posting written earlier this month under the name Haiyang Zhu, and displaying the same photo of Zhu given by Virginia authorities, provides a clue.

Stock market losses

The author expressed frustration over stock losses and other problems in the blog, dated 7 Jan.

'Big stock losses. Recently I've been so frustrated I think only of killing someone or committing suicide,' the posting read.

'There is no possibility of me recovering and I may even have to eat pickles for three years.

'I am now a little regretful, agricultural economics has no future. And she has added to my woes.'

The blog does not make clear who the 'she' is, though the date is significant. Miss Yang arrived on 8 Jan.

A subsequent posting, if genuine, is chilling.

He said: 'Are there beautiful singing voices in heaven, if there are I want to go to heaven quickly.'

Latest forum postings have cast doubt over the legitimacy of the blog. Some netizens have said it could be the work of a prankster who posted it soon after the murder.

Zhu's landlord also provided some clues to his state of mind.

He told WSLS.com that Zhu had become increasingly difficult to deal with.

Mr Will Segar of Sturbridge Square Apartments said: 'He was rude and belligerent.'

He said he had to remove the thermostat from Zhu's apartment because the young man and his two roommates refused to turn on the heat, which made the pipes freeze and burst.

Mr Segar said he also had to scold Zhu about storing firewood in the middle of his carpeted floor.

'I talked to a Blacksburg police officer about him, I told him he's harassing other people and he's a public nuisance, and he (the policeman) said he couldn't do anything and told me to talk to international affairs at Virginia Tech,' Mr Segar said.

Ms Tonya Spain, the property manager at Sturbridge, said that she also has had run-ins with Zhu over the past weeks and called his recent behaviour 'very odd, very bizarre'.

'Last week he came in and accused the staff of stealing his shoes,' she said. 'I said, 'You have two roommates; are you sure it wasn't one of them?' But he was adamant that staff had stolen his shoes.'

Zhu's roommates, identified as Virginia Tech students Ming Yi and Lei Pan, could not be reached for comment.

The door of their two-storey apartment was locked yesterday. Cigarette butts littered the yard in front.

Polite and respectful

Ms Kim Beisecker, director of international students, said she knew both Zhu and Miss Yang. She gave a different description of Zhu's personality.

'He was always polite and respectful, and she was just a darling young woman,' she said yesterday.

'We had just had orientation with her, and we knew him as a student,' she said.

She described Zhu as very unlike mass murderer Cho.

'This was a young man who had friends,' she said.

Acquaintances of both the victim and the suspect were at Virginia Tech's international centre yesterday for counselling, Ms Beisecker said.

Gruesome reminder of 2007 campus massacre

ON 16 Apr 2007, student Cho Seung Hui, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself.

The university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest rampage in US history.

After killing the first two students at the dorm, he returned to his room and left a note.

In it, he set out a list of grievances against the university and said: 'You caused me to do this.'

According to school officials, Cho even had time to post a warning on a school online forum before he moved to another building on the campus and began his deadly rampage.

His chilling warning: 'im going to kill people at vtech today.'

As more information became available, the gunman was found to be a lonely, brooding man who penned wildly violent thoughts - so violent that one of his teachers demanded that he be removed from his class.

This worrying behaviour led to him being pegged as a ticking time bomb by some of his professors and classmates.

Prior to the massacre, his first brush with the law was in 2005, when two female students accused him of stalking them. However, no charges were filed and he returned to classes.

He was also taken to a mental health facility later after his own parents worried that he might be suicidal.

This article was first published in The New Paper on 24 Jan 2009.