China School Knife Attack: Authorities Report 8 Killed, 17 Injured

A knife assault at a vocational school in eastern China on Saturday left eight people dead and seventeen injured. The suspect, a former student, has been taken into custody, according to police.

According to a statement from Yixing police, the attack happened in the evening at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology in Yixing, Jiangsu province.

The suspect, according to the police, was a 21-year-old former student who was supposed to graduate this year but failed his examinations. Police stated that the suspect had confessed and that “he returned to the school to express his anger and commit these murders.”

The institution is roughly 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of Shanghai and, according to its website, has over 12,000 students from all over the world. Among other things, it provides classes in fashion, pottery, design, and painting. Emergency services were fully deployed in Yixing, according to authorities, to treat the injured and offer follow-up care to individuals impacted by the incident.

“Mental health”

Social media did not immediately post any footage of the attack, which may indicate that authorities took the clip down.

In China, where firearms are highly regulated, violent knife crimes are not unusual, but attacks with such a high death toll are comparatively uncommon. A 62-year-old man killed 35 people and injured over 40 others earlier this week when he crashed his small SUV into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai.

The two tragic attacks that occurred this week stunned web users. One commenter on the well-known X-like website Weibo said, “What kind of state of despair must these people be in to go to such extremes?”

“Security on campuses must be boosted, along with more education about mental health, so other dramas like these do not happen,” another user wrote. “The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Another Weibo user bemoaned, “To survive these days, everyone has to work hard.” Only a few of the 6,357 comments that seemed to have been generated by CCTV’s statement were accessible.

In addition to the events in Zhuhai and Yixing, there have been numerous other attacks in the past few months.

A man attacked a store in Shanghai with a knife in October, killing three people and injuring fifteen more.

Additionally, a Japanese youngster was fatally stabbed in Shenzhen, a city in southern China that borders Hong Kong, the previous month. About 30 people were killed and over 140 injured in a knife attack on train commuters at a Kunming station in March 2014.