CHINA: Knife attacker kills 7 school children, injures 19 in northern. 😦😟https://t.co/WrL2A1YIUs via @STcom— Global Awareness 101 (@Mononoke__Hime) April 27, 2018
Strait Times, Singapore
written by AFP staff
Friday April 27, 2018
BEIJING – A knife-wielding man with a grudge killed nine middle school children and injured at least 10 others as they returned home in northern China on Friday (April 27), authorities said, in one of the deadliest such rampages in the country in recent years.
The 28-year-old suspect was detained and the injured children were receiving hospital treatment, the Mizhi County public security bureau in Shaanxi province said on its official social media account. Seven girls and two boys were killed, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing local police.
The ages of the children were not given, but middle schoolers are usually between 12 and 15 years old in China.
The incident took place at around 6:10 pm local time, the department said. A man surnamed Zhao from Zhaojiashan village in Mizhi County was arrested, the public security bureau said. The suspect confessed that he had been “bullied” when he attended the same Number Three Middle School when he was a child, “hated” his classmates and decided to use a “dagger” to kill people on Friday, the bureau said.
A video posted by The Paper, a daily, on video-sharing website Miaopai.com shows two or three bodies lying on the ground in a narrow lane. A person is heard shouting “hurry, call the police!” Police are seen running and later frogmarching a man down the street. AFP could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.
Knife attacks are not uncommon in the country. In February, a knife-wielding man with a personal grudge killed a woman and injured 12 others in a busy Beijing shopping mall – a rare act of violence in the heavily policed capital. In the southern city of Shenzhen, a man armed with a kitchen knife killed two people and wounded nine others in a supermarket last July.
Attacks have also targeted schoolchildren in the past, forcing authorities to increase security around schools. In January 2017, a man armed with a kitchen knife stabbed and wounded 11 children at a kindergarten in China’s southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
The previous February a knife-wielding assailant wounded 10 children in Haikou, in the southern island province of Hainan, before committing suicide. The man had entered the school in the afternoon, claiming that he was there to pick up his son.
The attacks have led to calls for more research into the root causes of such acts. Violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades as the nation’s economy has boomed and the gap between rich and poor has widened rapidly. Studies have also described a rise in the prevalence of mental disorders, some of them linked to stress as the pace of life becomes faster and support systems wither.
In June last year, a bomb blast that killed eight people and injured dozens outside a kindergarten in Fengxian, eastern China, was blamed on a 22-year-old introvert with health problems who had written the words “death” and “destroy” on the walls of his apartment. Material to make a homemade explosive device was found in the home.
👇 >>FLASHBACK to 2014<< 👇
CNN
written by Ralph Ellis
Sunday March 2, 2014
Lu Haiyan said the slaughter began while she and a friend were standing in the ticket hall of a Chinese train station.
"Suddenly, many people started running around crazily," she said on Tencent Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter. "We saw two people carrying big cleavers hacking whoever is in the way. They almost got to my back. Then I lost contact with (my friend) and I saw blood splashing in front of me."
29 people were killed and 130 were injured Saturday night when 10 men armed with long knives stormed the station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
Members of a separatist group from Xinjiang, in northwest China, are believed to have carried out the assault, authorities said. The report referred to them as "terrorists."
Police said they killed at least four attackers and shot and wounded a female suspect. Authorities were searching for other suspects.
The killing spree came out of nowhere.
Yang Haifei, a resident of Yunnan, told Xinhua he was buying a ticket when a group of people, most of them in black, rushed into the station with knives.
"I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone," he said, adding that people who were slower were severely injured. "They just fell on the ground."
He said he sustained injuries to his chest and back.
Lu Haiyan said she ran to the main road.
"I ran to a restaurant already with a full crowd," she said. "The restaurant owner shut the door for quite some time before reopening it. Both my hands and legs are shaking."
Xinhua quoted a 50-year-old woman whose older husband was among those killed.
"Why are the terrorists so cruel?" said Chen Guizhen, holding her husband's bloodied ID card.
In the aftermath, postings on Sina Weibo, another Twitter-like social medium, showed local police patrolling the station, with bodies in blood lying on the ground. Chinese state TV showed investigators putting a knife with a blade at least 2 feet long into an evidence bag.
Mass knife attacks are not unprecedented in China. Some occurred in 2010 and 2012, but the attacks happened at schools and didn't appear to have political connections.
Chinese President Xi Jinping urged law enforcement "to investigate and solve the case and punish the terrorists in accordance with the law," according to Xinhua.
Xinhua said the Kunming railway station is one of the largest in southwest China.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang asked local authorities to ensure safety at public places, Xinhua reported.
Two weeks ago, 11 "terrorists" died in the Xinjiang region, Xinhua reported.
Frequent outbreaks of violence have beset Xinjiang, a resource-rich area where the arrival of waves of Han Chinese people over the decades has fueled tensions with the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim ethnic group.
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