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Police in southern China’s Zhuhai city have arrested a driver accused of ramming his vehicle into people in a busy pedestrian zone, killing 35 and injuring 43.
The incident outside a sports stadium on Monday evening is the latest in a series of cases of apparently random attacks that analysts have said hint at rising social tensions in China.
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called on authorities to learn from the incident and to “strengthen at-source risk prevention and control . . . and do our best to protect people’s lives and social stability”. The “murderer” should be severely punished according to the law, Xi said in a statement carried by state media.
Police in Zhuhai, a city in southern Guangdong province, said they had arrested a 62-year-old suspect surnamed Fan while he attempted to flee from the scene, an area where local people congregate to exercise in the evenings.
The incident occurred just before the official opening on Tuesday of Zhuhai’s China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, one of Asia’s largest military air shows.
Videos posted on social media, many of which were quickly removed from Chinese platforms, showed several people lying injured on a running track outside the sports stadium.
Several drivers have deliberately collided their vehicles with pedestrians or other vehicles in China this year, according to police statements and local media, while analysts have said a spate of knife attacks across the country hint at rising social tensions.
In June, the Japanese government warned its citizens in China to be wary of knife attacks, following a stabbing that killed a Chinese woman and injured a Japanese woman and child.
The same month, four teachers from a US college were knifed in a park in Jilin in northeastern China. In September a stabbing near a school for Japanese children in Shenzhen, in which a child was killed, added to concerns. There have also been several similar attacks targeting Chinese nationals around the country, including in Shanghai, Jiangxi and Yunnan.
Zhuhai police said their investigation into the Zhuhai incident showed it was driven by the alleged attacker’s dissatisfaction with how he and his ex-wife’s property had been divided in their divorce.
They added that Fan was harming himself with a knife in the vehicle when found. He sustained severe injuries to his neck and other areas, causing a coma that prevented him from being interrogated.
One online commentator said the incident happened only 1km from their home and “the sound of ambulances filled the entire area”. “The hospitals were full of Zhuhai citizens donating blood” afterwards, the commentator said.