Attacker stabs 15 students, teacher during school day

A teacher wielding a knife broke into a primary school in southern China and stabbed 15 students and a teacher Wednesday. The same day, another school attacker was executed for killing eight children last month, police and state media reported.

The attacker taught at another primary school nearby, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

None of the 15 students nor the teacher is in life-threatening condition, said the director of the command center at the Leizhou Public security Bureau, who gave his name as Qin.

The attacker, identified by a local official as Chen Kangbing, broke into Leicheng No. 1 Primary School in Leizhou city at about 3 p.m. and hacked at the students and teacher, Xinhua said. He is in police custody.

The fourth- and fifth-graders were stabbed in their heads, backs and arms, Xinhua said, citing comments from Li Changwu, Leizhou city’s communist party secretary.
A nurse at an emergency clinic said staff there treated eight of the students for knife wounds to the head.

“None of them have life-threatening injuries,” the nurse said.

A man from the surgical department of Leizhou Hospital of Chinese Medicine said seven students were treated there. He refused to give his name. Calls to the school rang unanswered.

There was no immediate word about a motive for the attack, which came the same day Zheng Minsheng, 42, was executed in the neighboring Fujian province for the March 23 murders of eight children outside their elementary school as they waited with their parents for classes to start.

China has witnessed a series of school attacks in recent years, most of which are blamed on people with personal grudges or who suffer from mental illness.