Four stabbed to death in latest Chinese knife attack
Policemen guard around the site of a deadly stabbing incident in a residential block in Changsha, Hunan province, China, 14 March 2014. It’s said by witnesses several Uygur-like people started stabbing passers-by after a quarrel. At least three people were killed by the assailants, and one of attackers got shot by the police. (EPA)
Four people were stabbed to death Friday morning at a market in the capital of Hunan Province in central China. Local media report that several Uighur “naan peddlers” suddenly went on a knifing rampage.
Earlier this month, 29 people were slashed to death and another 140 injured in a knife attack at a train station in southern China. Authorities quickly pinned the “terrorist attack” on “Xinjiang separatist forces.” Xinjiang is a far northwestern province of China populated by the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group.
Early Friday morning it wasn’t clear whether the attack was an act or terror. The South China Morning Post reported that the assailants owned a local baked naan shop, and at 10 a.m. a dispute they had with several local residents quickly escalated into violence.
Xinhua says five attackers slashed passerby. Police shot and killed one knife wielder, and arrested another, the state-run media outlet said. Early photos uploaded to the Chinese social media website Weibo show several bodies laying in the middle of the street or on stairs, soaked in blood. Another shows a mustachioed man in handcuffs. The authenticity of the photographs could not be immediately confirmed.
One of the dead, AP reports, was an elderly vender and another man who “was slashed and stabbed repeatedly as he lay bleeding on the ground.”
This most recent attack is likely to exacerbate tension in a nation already rattled by the knife attacks two weeks ago. Unrest in Xinjiang has killed at least 100 people last year, and Beijing has moved to clamp down on the ethnic group, which has often opposed the cultural and religious restrictions shackling them.
