Killer blogged he was ready to take a life

He was so frustrated he was thinking of killing someone or ending his life, Zhu Haiyang wrote in a chilling weblog entry - barely two weeks before he hacked off the head of a fellow mainland student newly arrived at US university Virginia Tech.

'Big stock losses ... and she, one more disaster on top of others,' the 25-year-old from Ningbo wrote - hinting at relationship problems - on January 7, just a day before his victim, a Beijing woman named Yang Xin, arrived at the college.

On Wednesday, Zhu decapitated 22-year-old Yang with a kitchen knife in front of seven people in a cafe at the university - just 21 months after it became the scene of the worst campus massacre in United States history, when a Korean student shot dead 32 students before killing himself.

Authorities in the US state of Virginia, who have charged Zhu with first-degree murder, said Yang listed him as one of her emergency contacts. However, people who claimed to know both of them said online that this was only because Zhu was one of the few Chinese people Yang knew in Virginia.

They had met when, at the request of an association of Chinese students, Zhu helped with her orientation on the campus in the town of Blacksburg.

Contributors to Chinese- language internet chat rooms expressed outrage at Yang's death, with many calling Zhu cold-blooded.

'Life is short. Shouldn't you find ways to release the pressure other than killing?' one wrote.