State media say 9 vocational students wounded in latest China knife attack

Report says 9 hurt in latest China knife attack

BEIJING — At least five men armed with knives burst into the dormitory of a vocational college and slashed nine students Wednesday, one of them seriously, in the latest knife attack at a school in China, state media reported.

China News Service said the pre-dawn attack took place in Haikou, the capital of the southern island province of Hainan, when five or six men burst into a dormitory at the Hainan Institute of Science and Technology and slashed the students. It said eight were wounded slightly, while one’s hand was cut off.

Two students remained in hospital with non-life threatening wounds, the reports said.

Because it was a vocational college, the students would have been much older than the children targeted in a string of attacks at schools across China in the last two months.

China News Service said the attack may have been related to an incident late Tuesday when some of the college’s students had a confrontation with men at a food stall outside of the school. Such schools usually attract students in their late teens and early twenties.

A spokesman for the Hainan provincial government confirmed the report but said he had no additional information. The official Xinhua News Agency put the number of attackers at more than 10 and said they first assaulted a guard and disabled security cameras before rushing into two dormitories where lights remained on and hacking away apparently at random. It said 13 students were injured in all.

The attack follows five separate assaults by lone assailants against schoolchildren as young as three in the last two months that have left 17 dead and more than 50 wounded, including some adults.

The violence has resulted in a boost of security at schools across China, with nervous parents accompanying students to school and police and security guards posted at entrances.

While revenge was the apparent motive in the latest attack, previous rampages have involved apparently deranged people seeking to vent their rage on innocent victims with whom they had little or no connection.

Sociologists say those attacks reflect a failure to diagnose and treat mental illness, along with anger and frustration among people who feel victimized by China’s high-stress, fast-changing society. Experts say the frequency of the attacks and choice of schoolchildren as the main victims suggest a copycat element.

In a similar incident, a cleaver-wielding man killed one woman and wounded five at a market in the southern province of Guangdong on Sunday before jumping to his death.

While the man appeared to have deliberately targeted women, it was not immediately clear what triggered the attack.