Massacres

The building where a gunman killed 30 people and himself on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg will be reopened for offices and laboratories, but it won't be used for classrooms, the university announced. Norris Hall will open June 18 for the engineering science and mechanics and the civil and environmental engineering departments. They were the primary occupants of the building when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty members on the campus April 16.

Efrain Rios Montt, the former Guatemalan military dictator who ruled his country during one of the bloodiest phases of its civil war, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity Friday for the systematic massacre of more than 1,700 Maya people. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The landmark ruling by a panel of three Guatemalan judges came after a dramatic trial that featured testimony from dozens of ethnic Ixil Maya, who described atrocities committed by the army and security forces who sought to clean the countryside of Marxist guerrillas and their sympathizers during the 1982-83 period that Rios Montt, an army general and coup leader, served as the country's de facto leader.

A human rights group on Monday called for an inquiry into reports that as many as 300 Shiite Muslim civilians were recently massacred by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban in the central province of Bamian. Citing witnesses, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Taliban troops rounded up and shot about 300 men after capturing the city of Yakaolang in January. The Taliban rejected the report. The United Nations said Jan.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - The University of Colorado-Denver stood firm Friday in saying it never barred James E. Holmes from campus, despite newly released court documents that indicate the suspect in the Aurora movie massacre had his student ID card deactivated after he alarmed a school psychiatrist. Dr. Lynne Fenton told campus police officer Lynn Whitten on June 12 - more than a month before the July 20 rampage that killed 12 and injured 70 - that Holmes had "homicidal thoughts" and might be a danger to the public.

A Filipino farmer Saturday confessed to leading a massacre on a village church last Tuesday, killing 17 people including his son, because he was upset that his wife would not sleep with him, the military said. Pelagio Caro was one of nine farmers arrested Friday for suspected involvement in the attack in the mountain village of Bagtik, on the Philippine island of Cebu. Twelve other worshipers were wounded.

An international court has ordered Guatemala to pay a record $7.9 million in compensation to survivors of a 1982 army-led massacre of hundreds of civilians in the country's Maya Indian heartland, court officials said. Troops entered the hilltop hamlet of Plan de Sanchez, raping women before herding villagers into a building and blowing it up. A total of 268 people were killed.

The deed was stomach-turning: Hooded gunmen burst into a Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center, gathered together those inside and lined them up before opening fire with semiautomatic weapons. When the shooting was over, 18 people were dead. Attention focused immediately on the site of Wednesday night's killings: a rehab center, where addicts go to get clean, suggesting a new level of depravity in Mexico's drug violence. Theories abounded: The victims were targets of rival gang members.

Mexico has rearrested a man accused of ordering the killings of 45 Indians in the southern state of Chiapas 10 years ago. Right-wing paramilitaries killed the Tzotzil Indians, including pregnant women and children, in the village of Acteal on Dec. 22, 1997. The Chiapas state government said it had arrested Antonio Santiz on Saturday.

Liberia's Human Rights Commission has accused forces loyal to then-President Charles Taylor of massacring 369 civilians including children and pregnant women last April. Dempster Brown, the commission's president, said both Taylor's supporters and foes had committed atrocities during a 14-year civil war that ended in August with a deal exiling Taylor. Brown said three commanders responsible for the massacre should be arrested immediately.

A court has handed 14 soldiers sentences of 40 years in prison for massacring Maya Indians in 1995, officials said. The sentences are among the longest given Guatemalan troops for crimes against human rights. The court ruled that the former soldiers were guilty of extrajudicial killings, court secretary Leonardo Pop said. The men, all members of an army patrol, killed 11 people and injured 30 in an attack on Xaman, a Maya community in northern Guatemala.

Lawmakers in Connecticut, the site of the Dec. 14 massacre that renewed a national debate over gun control, passed a bipartisan measure that increases background checks for buyers and bans the sale of semiautomatic rifles like the one used in Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Senate passed the bill 26-10 yesterday, and the House of Representatives approved it 105-44 in Hartford. The legislature is controlled by Democrats, and Democratic Governor Dan Malloy, 57, has said he will sign the measure.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - When the district attorney announced Monday that the suspect in the Aurora theater massacre could face the death penalty, one spectator pumped his fist in triumph. Others held their heads in their hands. George Brauchler, elected district attorney for Colorado's 18th Judicial District in November, said he had wrestled with the decision for months. "It is my determination and my intention that in this case, for James Eagan Holmes, justice is death," Brauchler said quietly.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - Prosecutors are expected to announce Monday whether they will seek the death penalty in the Aurora movie theater massacre - a decision that could affect not only the defendant, James E. Holmes, but also capital punishment in Colorado. As the critical decision loomed, the defense and prosecution were scrambling to win the upper hand - in the world of public opinion, if not the courtroom - in an escalating war of words. Holmes, 25, a former neuroscience student, is accused of opening fire in a packed premiere showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" on July 20, killing 12 people and injuring about 70 others.

Adam Lanza, the gunman who attacked a Connecticut elementary school, killing 20 children and six adults, had an arsenal of guns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and even samurai swords, knives and a bayonet, according to search warrants released on Thursday. The warrants outlined what police found in Lanza's home and car during official searches of the Newton, Conn., home Lanza shared with his mother, who he killed before the Dec. 14 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - James E. Holmes, accused of unleashing the Aurora movie theater massacre in July, has offered to plead guilty to killing 12 people and injuring 70 if prosecutors do not seek the death penalty. In an unusual court filing, defense lawyers revealed Wednesday that they had made the standing offer weeks ago for Holmes to serve life in prison without possibility of parole for the July 20 mass shooting. So far the prosecution has declined the offer, the document said.

A student at the University of Central Florida may have aborted his plan to massacre fellow students at his dorm and decided instead to kill himself, officials said Monday. Authorities identified the dead man as James Oliver Seevakumara, 30, of Lake Mary, Fla., who was found shot in the head in his bedroom of a four-bedroom suite in the Tower 1 residence hall. He had a .45-caliber handgun, a .22-caliber tactical rifle and a backpack containing four improvised explosive devices, officials said.

Authorities have unearthed the bullet-riddled remains of 15 peasants slain by soldiers after the lone survivor of the massacre came forward after two decades of silence, Peruvian officials said. The witness led a prosecutor and a forensic team to the bodies last month near the village of Totos, 200 miles southeast of the capital, Lima, chief forensic investigator Luis Castillejo said.

U.N. war crimes judges at The Hague sentenced a Bosnian Serb to 27 years in prison for his confessed role in a 1995 massacre. Ex-army commander Momir Nikolic, 48, wept and covered his face with his hands. Serbian troops killed up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys after overrunning the U.N.-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Meanwhile, two Muslim officers went on trial. Retired Gen. Enver Hadzihasanovic, 53, and Amir Kubura, 39, are charged with murder and other offenses.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. - Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales , accused of killing 16 villagers and wounding six more in Afghanistan , will undergo a government sanity review this weekend to determine his mental state, his attorneys said. Bales faces a military court-martial with the possibility of receiving the death penalty. His attorneys had previously opposed a sanity review, saying that the process was too favorable to military prosecutors, who also have opposed Bales' hopes for an insanity plea.

FT. HOOD, Texas - Capital murder trials are rare in the military's criminal justice system, but they are familiar territory for the judge who will handle the trial of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 in a shooting rampage at this base in central Texas. The judge is Col. Tara Abbey Osborn, and she once served at Ft. Hood, the sprawling facility known as "the Great Place. " Osborn has presided over "numerous serious felony trials, one capital trial and other non-capital homicide trials," a base spokesman said.