Update: The student has been identified as being of South Korean descent. Some detail here.

As was likely the case, the Va Tech shooter was a student. The AP so reports in the headline and first paragraph of its latest update:
Va. Tech president: Gunman was a student

- An Asian student at Virginia Tech massacred at least 30 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, cutting down his victims before the university could grasp what was happening, the university president said Tuesday.

The only other details from the piece on the question of identity is as follows:

“We do know that he was an Asian male — this is the second event — an Asian male who was a resident in one of our dormitories. He was one of our students,” University President Charles Steger told CNN Tuesday.

The Chicago Sun Times reports that the student might have been a foreign national from China: Gunman may have been in U.S. on visa

Authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history was a Chinese man who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa.

The 24-year-old man arrived in San Francisco on United Airlines on Aug. 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators have not linked him to any terrorist groups, the source said.

This leads Debbie Shlussel , in an update to a post that is full of rampant speculation that the student must have been Pakistani, reacts as follows:

Lovely. Yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students.

Right–million upon millions of foreign students come to study in the country over the decades and now we have definitive proof what a mistake that has been! There is certainly no value in helping to educate the world’s population, helping in development around the globe, and hopefully spreading core American values. Nope, one murderer proves that those foreigners oughtn’t be allowed in the country.

What xenophobic pap.