Answering calls to find out why students and faculty learned so late that a gunman was on the Virginia Tech campus, the state governor ordered a probe into the school's handling of information during a rampage that left 33 dead.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has promised to bring together experts to investigate criticism the university waited too long to inform students a gunman was on campus.
(Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press)

Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine told CBS's The Early Show on Wednesday that although he was "satisfied" that school officials "did everything they felt they needed to do with the heat on the table," he would assemble a group of outside experts to investigate whether university officials had advance warning about the shooter.

Criticisms about the speed of the school's response to the worst campus shooting in U.S. history were "deep and troubling," Kaine said, and "there will be a very thorough after-action report."

"Before we talk about any police changes, we have to get an assessment of what occurred."

A key question is why campus police took more than two hours on Monday to inform the university community of a potential danger on campus.

Two hours after the killer gunned down two students in a dorm, he was able to cross the campus and kill 30 more in an engineering and science building. He then killed himself.

Bomb threat hoax

As new details continued to emerge about the delay in police action, the university in the town of Blacksburg had to deal with another distraction Wednesday — a hoax bomb threat.

Police in SWAT gear quickly descended on Burruss Hall, where the anonymous caller told police a bomb was planted, but authorities soon declared the building was safe and allowed people to reenter. The building houses the office of the university's president.

Although concerns about the false bomb turned out to be unfounded, the incident showed how jittery the campus has become since Monday.

Students were still learning the names of the 32 people who were killed that day — as well as the identity of their killer.

He was Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old undergrad enrolled in his senior year as an English major, police say. A native of South Korea, Cho moved to the United States at age eight and grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Centreville, according to U.S. immigration records.

With files from the Associated Press