Authorities reported that two persons were murdered and twenty-one injured in a knife attack that happened on Tuesday at a hospital in southwest China.
The attack at Yunnan province’s Zhenxiong County People’s Hospital had no stated purpose. According to a Zhenxiong police statement, the suspect is a man from a village in the same county. It stated the injured were receiving treatment.
A witness told the internet publication Red Star News that he had barely avoided the attack and that one or more doctors were among the casualties. According to the Red Star social media post, the witness captured people who were bleeding and had fallen to the ground, as well as an elderly person attempting to assist a younger person.
While the police statement stated that 21 individuals had been hurt, earlier media sources had stated that 23 people had been hurt. A man was seen being carried away by the police in a video that Guizhou Province Television had uploaded online.
Zhenxiong county is close to the Sichuan province border and located 220 miles northeast of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan.
In China, knife attacks have occurred previously, most frequently in kindergartens. Last July, in the southeast of the country in Guangdong province, a man brandishing a knife attacked a kindergarten, killing six people and injuring one more.