Shanghai Knife Attack Kills Two Schoolchildren

HONG KONG — The police in Shanghai say a man armed with a kitchen knife killed two boys in an attack outside an elementary school on Thursday morning.

Another boy and a woman were also stabbed, but their injuries were not life-threatening, according to a statement from the police in the Xuhui district of Shanghai.

The attack occurred outside the Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School at about 11:30 a.m. Bystanders helped grab the suspected assailant, whom the police described as a 29-year-old unemployed man who had moved to Shanghai this month.

Photos on Chinese social media showed a man tied up with a length of webbing and lying face down on the sidewalk as uniformed officers watched over him.

A police statement said the suspect, who was surnamed Huang, told officers that his lack of a stable income “led to thoughts of taking revenge on society, which he carried out.”

Firearms are highly regulated in China, and mass shootings are rare. China has seen knife attacks, though, for more than a decade, often targeting children in schools.

In April, a man with a knife killed nine students and injured 10 at a middle school in Shaanxi Province.

While exact motives in such episodes can be hard to pinpoint, experts say that some attackers express a desire to retaliate against strangers for harm they believe has been done to them by society at large. Mental illness is sometimes a factor, as is the copycat effect that arises from widespread coverage of such killings.

Since a string of several attacks within a few months in 2010, schools in China have increased safety measures, including adding security guards and gates at campus entrances.

One photo from Shanghai on Thursday showed a security guard standing several feet behind civilians who were apparently trying to seize the suspect. That image stirred anger online among people who thought the security guards could have acted more quickly.

“These are the black-clothed security guards swarming all over the streets that you all pay so much to hire,” wrote one Shanghai resident on Weibo, the social media service. “Most of the time I don’t know if they’re any use, but look where they’re standing during today’s incident!”