Two people were killed and 21 others wounded in a stabbing attack at a hospital in southwestern China on Tuesday, authorities said.
At the moment the reason for the attack recorded in the Zhenxiong County People’s Hospitalin the province of Yunnan. The suspect is a man from a town in the same county, police said. Zhenxiong it’s a statement. All the wounded were being treated, he added.
A witness told Red Star News, an online media, who narrowly managed to escape the attack and that among the injured were one or more doctors. A video from the witness showed bleeding people who had fallen to the floor and an elderly person trying to help another, Red Star said in a social media post.
Earlier in the day, state media reported that 23 people had been injured, but police lowered the number to 21. A video posted by Guizhou provincial television showed police taking a man away from the scene. the facts.
Zhenxiong is a county located 360 kilometers (220 mi) north of the Yunnan provincial capital, Kunming, and is near the Sichuan region.
Local authorities and media initially reported that the event had left “ten victims,” a figure that, as they later clarified, did not specifically refer to fatalities.
The incident took place at 1:20 p.m. local time (05:20 GMT), according to the official Xinhua news agency, which added that the authorities are “verifying and verifying” the situation.
“The situation is still somewhat chaotic”a witness told the newspaper The Paper, which states that the authorities are still counting the dead and injured.
According to videos that have not yet been verified, the assailant has already been captured by security forces outside the premises.
Hospital surveillance images distributed by the aforementioned media show a man in the hospital carrying at least two knives with which he proceeded to attack several people, after which several fell to the ground with injuries.
At the moment the motives of the attacker are unknown, although several violent episodes in hospitals in the Asian country caused the authorities to deploy armed police in these types of centers in 2016 to stop attacks by patients or relatives against health personnel.
In 2020, the Asian giant enacted a health law that granted specific protection to medical personnel and prohibited threatening or endangering the safety of workers in the sector, although factors such as the scarcity of medical resources and the high cost of some treatments remain. source of conflicts.
In recent years, several incidents of stabbings or attacks against crowds have also been recorded in China, which some Chinese media often refer to as “acts of revenge against society.”
Knife attacks have been reported in China before, often in kindergartens. A man armed with a knife killed six people and injured one more last July at a children’s school in the southeastern province of Guangdong.
(With information from AP and EFE)
