A man stabbed eight teenagers to death as they slept and injured four others after breaking into a school dormitory in central China on Friday morning, teachers and local authorities said.
The murders, the latest in a spate of grizzly attacks on schoolchildren in China, took place at High School Number Two in Ruzhou city, Henan province.
”It happened in the boys dormitory. It happened around midnight,” said a teacher at the school, who did not want to be named.
”All the dead are high school level children,” she said.
China News Service (CNS) said that among the four injured, two were in serious condition.
Local police and the Public Security Bureau have begun investigations, although no motive was immediately apparent.
”The police are here at the school at the moment,” said the teacher.
A Ruzhou government official confirmed the incident happened around midnight, but said more than one dormitory was targeted.
”It happened in several dormitories, at least three,” he told the French news agency AFP.
”The eight boys that died were all in the lower beds of bunk beds.”
Another teacher, reached at his home, said police had ordered school staff not to talk to the media, but he confided that a lone knife-wielding attacker entered the school and that he remained on the loose.
”It happened on the second floor. According to one student who lives on the same floor, there was only one suspect,” he said.
He said the man apparently scaled a three metre high wall to get into the school compound and then entered the dormitory through an unlocked door.
”Because students often go out to internet cafes late in the evening the building door was not locked,” he said.
The school, which has about 3 000 students and 190 teaching staff, employs security guards who normally patrol the grounds at night, he added.
China has witnessed a series of recent attacks on schoolchildren.
Last month, a five-year-old boy and his teacher were killed at a Beijing kindergarten by a man trying to steal. The boy’s body was found stuffed in a washing machine.
In September, a man with a knife and homemade bombs attacked 28 children in a kindergarten in east China’s Suzhou city. No one was killed.
That same month, a knife-wielding man stabbed 25 children and kidnapped a nine-year-old girl at a primary school in eastern Shandong province. He was executed this week.
Meanwhile, in August a mentally ill caretaker killed one child and injured 17 others in a knife attack at a Beijing kindergarten.
Henan, home to 96-million people, is China’s most populous province and has witnessed 1 681 murder cases this year, CNS said, citing police figures. – Sapa-AFP