04-29-2010, 06:48 PM
Quote:Attacker Stabs 28 Chinese Children
BEIJING — An unemployed man entered a kindergarten in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province on Thursday morning and stabbed 28 kindergarten students and three adults, critically injuring at least five children, local authorities and state news agencies reported.
Local residents at the entrance of a kindergarten in Taixing, Jiangsu, where a knife attack occurred Thursday.
It was the second mass stabbing of young students in two days, and the third in less than a month.
Many of the injured children were just four years old and shared the same classroom, according to initial reports by the state-run Xinhua news agency. The adult victims included two teachers and a security guard.
Police officers identified the assailant as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old former insurance agent. According to Xinhua, he began attacking children with a knife about eight inches long at about 9 a.m. at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, a middle-class school in Taixing, about 570 miles southeast of Beijing.
Little other information was immediately available. Taixing propaganda officials did not respond to telephone calls.
Thursday’s attack occurred a day after a 33-year-old man in neighboring Shandong Province stabbed 15 fourth-and fifth-graders at a primary school in Leizhou city. None of those students was seriously wounded. Authorities said that attacker, identified as Chen Kangbing, had taught at nearby school but had been on leave since 2006, apparently because of mental illness.
On March 23, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, also on China’s east coast, as they waited with parents for classes to begin. Some Chinese press reports stated that Mr. Zheng also had mental problems.
Those murders created a nationwide sensation, stirring calls for a school safety crackdown. Mr. Zheng was executed on Wednesday after what one legal expert, the former Peking University law professor and civil rights advocate He Weifang, said was an unusually speedy trial.
There was no immediate explanation as to why the three attackers chose young students as their targets. While assaults in schools are not particularly common, an eerily similar series of five knife attacks took place in August and September 2004 in schools and a child-care center. Three of the attacks occurred on China’s Pacific east coast, including assaults in Guangdong and Shandong, where two of the recent stabbing sprees unfolded.
In February 2008, two students at another Leizhou school were stabbed to death by a former student who then killed himself by jumping off the school building.
In the current string of knifings, “probably there was some kind of copycat element,” Liu Jianqing, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People in similar predicaments emulate this because of the impact of the mass media these days.”
The assaults likely were also acts of self-destruction by the attackers, he said, because such crimes stand a high chance of drawing a death sentence in Chinese courts.
Beyond mental illness, some experts like Mr. He said that rising strains in China’s fast-changing society may have a role in the growing number of violent crimes. Most of the school assaults have occurred on the developed, urban east coast, where both the cost of living and income inequality are high.
The man executed on Wednesday, Mr. Zheng, wanted revenge on “rich” and “powerful officials” in Nanping, where he lived, Xinhua quoted his neighbors as saying in a recent lengthy article about the murders.
He selected the primary school where the slayings took place because it was the city’s finest, the article stated.
"Let's fight... like gentlemen." - Dudley, SF3
