Knife-wielding man kills 7 kids as ‘revenge’ for being bullied at school a decade ago
The 28-year-old man told police that he still carried around a hatred for his former middle school in Yulin, Shaanxi province
As they were returning home from school on Friday evening, seven middle school students were killed and 19 others were injured by a man wielding a knife and a grudge in the Shaanxi city of Yulin.
Police have detained the suspect, a 28-year-old local surnamed Zhao. According to a statement from the public security bureau of Mizhi county, Zhao said that he committed the attack because he had been bullied when he attended the same middle school more than a decade ago and still carried that hatred against his classmates around with him.
Five girls and two boys were killed in the attack, which occurred near the school at around 6 pm on Friday evening. 19 survivors are currently being treated at a local hospital. It’s not clear how many are in critical condition.
Photos and videos from the scene of the mass stabbing have gone viral on Chinese social media. They show bloody children lying on the ground and others being carried away while the suspect is marched up an alley by police.
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In an inspiring response to this tragedy, hundreds of locals showed up outside of the hospital later in the evening after a call for blood donations made the rounds on WeChat and Weibo with Chinese superstar actress Angelababy even forwarding the post.
Unfortunately, vicious stabbings involving schoolchildren are nothing new in China. In the early part on this decade, there was an extremely troubling string of incidents involving men bursting into schools and hacking down as many children as they could.
With tight restrictions on guns in China, assailants were forced to use knives or cleavers to carry out their massacres. The government pinned the blame of these attacks on those with mental health problems looking for easy targets.
While the number of these kind of school stabbings has certainly decreased in recent years, they still do happen from time to time. Most recently in January 2017, when a 41-year-old man sneaked into a Guangxi kindergarten with a kitchen knife and injured five kids before being subdued by teachers.
