Man slashes 28 children in Chinese kindergarten attack

A MAN with a knife attacked a kindergarten class in China yesterday, slashing 28 children, two teachers and a security guard who tried to stop him.

This was the second such attack in two days and the fourth incident in a month.

Five of the pupils injured at the Zhongxin kindergarten in Taixing city, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, were in critical condition in hospital, although none of their injuries was believed to be life-threatening.

The series of school stabbing sprees was blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness and has led to calls for better security at educational establishments.

The assailant entered the school at 9.30am, wielding a 20cm (8in) knife, and proceeded to stab a security guard who tried to stop him, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Attacks on children have a special resonance in China because the one-child policy means people are generally restricted to having just one offspring, and Chinese people are extremely protective of their children. Most schools have security guards at the gates, who are generally unarmed.

The suspect was identified as Xu Yuyuan (47), who had been jobless since being fired from an insurance company in 2001, Xinhua said. He subsequently got involved in pyramid selling schemes.

On Wednesday this week, a man broke into a primary school in Guangdong province’s Leizhou city in southern China and wounded 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack.

The assailant, who stabbed children in their heads, backs and arms, was a teacher who suffered from mental illness and had been on sick leave since February 2006. He was now in police custody, Xinhua said.

That attack came on the same day that a former medical worker Zheng Minsheng (42) was executed in Fujian province for the stabbing murders of eight children as they waited with their parents to enter their elementary school, a case that horrified China.

Two weeks ago, a mentally ill man with a meat cleaver hacked to death a child and an elderly woman in the province of Guangxi and wounded five others.

“There should be more attention paid to campus security,” ran one editorial in the Beijing News. “These campus massacres happened one after another. School administrators can no longer leave things to chance – cannot think that murder will not take place in their schools.”