CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A state panel investigating the Virginia Tech shootings is ready to craft its final report, having spent more than nine hours Tuesday discussing how to treat sensitive information about the case.

The panel's chairman said the report will address the mental health history of gunman Seung-Hui Cho, but added that privacy issues will affect how the panel treats that information in the report.

The Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel spent the day meeting privately with lawyers, partly to discuss how it should handle the academic and mental health records of Cho, who killed 32 people and himself in the April 16 shooting rampage.

Gerald Massengill, retired Virginia State Police superintendent and chairman of the panel, said the report will answer the chief questions that Gov. Tim Kaine raised when he appointed the eight-member group days after the shootings. But he declined to elaborate on those answers, saying, "I think it would be best if we let the final report speak for itself."

The panel, with the help of consultants, will divide the report into chapters that cover all aspects of the shootings. The categories will include Cho's brush with the mental health system, the actions of Tech administrators and police, firearms laws and the overall response in the aftermath of the shootings.

To produce the report, the panel must distill thousands of pages of documents and scores of interviews into a document that addresses questions about the case and offers recommendations for preventing similar tragedies. The panel also discussed that task on Tuesday, Massengill said,

"We discussed the entire event in some form today," he said.

-- Michael Sluss