Eight people were killed after a former student went on a stabbing rampage at a vocational college in eastern China.
Police arrested a 21-year-old suspect, identified by the surname Xu, on Saturday for allegedly carrying out a deadly stabbing spree at the Wuxi Institute of Arts and Technology in Yixing city, Jiangsu province, approximately 1,000 kilometres south of Beijing. The incident took place around 6.30pm (local time), police said.
This is the second such incident of mass killing to rock the country in less than a week.
At least 17 others who sustained injuries were rushed to local hospitals. Emergency services were fully mobilised to treat the wounded and provide follow-up care for the affected, according to the authorities.
Police said the suspect was a former student at the school and was due to graduate this year, but failed his exams. “He returned to the school to express his anger and commit these murders,” the authorities were quoted by AFP news agency as saying.
The Yixing Public Security Bureau said the suspect was also dissatisfied with his internship compensation and later confessed to the crime.
Videos on social media showed the police entering the vocational college with shields to subdue the suspect.
The stabbing has come as a shock to the nation already reeling from the aftermath of a car attack in the city of Zhuhai, where at least 35 people were killed by a 62-year-old man, who drove his car in loops at a sports centre. Authorities on Saturday charged the suspect, identified by surnamed Fan, who was reportedly unhappy over a divorce property settlement at the time of the attack.
The recent flare of violence has prompted a heavily censored online discussion on the toll of the economic slowdown and whether young people will find themselves worse off than the generations before them that benefited from China’s rapid development.
One online commentator said the Wuxi attack appeared to reflect a sense of entitlement for a generation that had not expected hardship, a “giant baby mentality”.
“Always thinking that they are so aggrieved, everyone is persecuting me, I study and struggle just to be a beast of burden,” one person wrote on the Chinese social media platform Weibo on Sunday.
Violent knife attacks are not uncommon in China, where firearms are strictly controlled, but there has been a spate of killings, which has triggered an online discussion about the nation’s mental health. At least six other high-profile knife attacks have been recorded this year across China.
In late October, a 50-year-old man wounded five people including three minors in a knife attack near one of Beijing’s top primary schools in Haidian district at the school dismissal time.
A fortnight earlier a 60-year-old man conducted a knife attack in front of a primary school in the central area of Guangzhou.