Student arrested for threatening US university massacre

Miami: Police arrested a female student at a US university who threatened to open fire on classmates, authorities said today, as the US grapples with a spate of campus shootings.

The second year student at Emory University near Atlanta was arrested on Sunday, just over a week after a gunman killed nine people at a community college in the state of Oregon.

According to local broadcaster WXIA-TV, the student posted a message on the mobile app Yik Yak.

“I’m shooting up the school. Tomorrow. Stay in your rooms. The ones on the quad are the ones who will go first,” the message said, according to the station.

Yik Yak allows users to see posts in a radius of up to five miles (eight kilometers).

The message was up for only several minutes, but several students saw it and one called 911 emergency services, Emory University said in a statement.

“At this time a sophomore student has confessed to sending the message and has been arrested,” the university told students in an email.

The student, who has not been named, is accused of “making terrorist threats against the university as a result of a social media message that she posted early Sunday morning,” the university said in a statement.

The student was being held in the Newton County jail pending the filing of charges, the university said.

On Friday, President Barack Obama met in Oregon with relatives of victims of the deadly October 1 rampage there, as shootings on two more school campuses left two people dead and four wounded.

Obama has angrily called on Congress to do more, warning that failure to act on gun control was a “political decision,” vowing to keep pushing for reform.