A knife-wielding man stabbed 12 students in a provincial high
school, killing eight and injuring four, local police said on
Friday.
Eight died instantly in dorm. Four injured students were rushed
to hospital on Friday morning.?
The murders took place in the boy's dormitory of No 2 High
School in Ruzhou, central China's Henan
Province, several hundred kilometers south of Beijing.
The students were all fast asleep when the incident happened at
a quarter to 12 on Thursday night.
The victims are all schoolboys aged 16 to 17.
As a boarding school, most of the students, if not all, live on
campus in large dormitories with a resident teacher to take care of
them. They generally travelled home once every two weeks.
On hearing the news, many horrified parents came from all parts
of the city to the campus to visit their children, said a local
source.
Classes were not held on Friday and the school has strengthened
its security measures.
The murder suspect, identified as Yan Yanming, was seized at 4
pm Friday by local police in Ruzhou. Yan, 21-year old man with
junior middle school education, failed to commit a suicide after
killing the students. His mother reported to local police.
He broke into the high school with a knife in his hand at 23:45
Thursday and chopped eight students to death and four others to
injury, according to the local police who got the urgent report at
2:00 AM Friday.
Police said the attacker ran from the school after the slayings
and they received the first emergency call at around 2 AM Friday
morning, more than two hours after the attacker broke into the
school grounds and began the brutal attacks.
Authorities were also busy investigating the motive and
identifying the victims.
China has suffered a series of knife attacks in schools and
day-care centers in recent months.
The authorities have ordered schools nationwide to tighten
security by hiring guards and upgrading surveillance devices.
Authorities on Wednesday executed a man convicted of kidnapping
a child and wounding 24 children with a kitchen knife in September
at an elementary school in east China's Shandong Province.
In August, 15 children, one of whom died from head wounds, were
slashed by a janitor at a kindergarten in Beijing.
And in October, at another Beijing kindergarten, police reported
that a man killed a teacher and a 5-year-old boy pupil.
(China Daily, Xinhua News Agency November 27,
2004)
