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Police in southern China’s Zhuhai metropolis have arrested a driver accused of ramming his automobile into folks in a busy pedestrian zone, killing 35 and injuring 43.
The incident exterior a sports activities stadium on Monday night is the most recent in a sequence of instances of apparently random assaults that analysts have mentioned trace at rising social tensions in China.
Chinese language President Xi Jinping on Tuesday known as on authorities to be taught from the incident and to “strengthen at-source danger prevention and management . . . and do our greatest to guard folks’s lives and social stability”. The “assassin” needs to be severely punished in response to the regulation, Xi mentioned in a press release carried by state media.
Police in Zhuhai, a metropolis in southern Guangdong province, mentioned they’d arrested a 62-year-old suspect surnamed Fan whereas he tried to flee from the scene, an space the place native folks congregate to train within the evenings.
The incident occurred simply earlier than the official opening on Tuesday of Zhuhai’s China Worldwide Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, one in all Asia’s largest navy air reveals.
Movies posted on social media, a lot of which had been shortly faraway from Chinese language platforms, confirmed a number of folks mendacity injured on a working observe exterior the sports activities stadium.
A number of drivers have intentionally collided their automobiles with pedestrians or different automobiles in China this 12 months, in response to police statements and native media, whereas analysts have mentioned a spate of knife assaults throughout the nation trace at rising social tensions.
In June, the Japanese authorities warned its residents in China to be cautious of knife assaults, following a stabbing that killed a Chinese language girl and injured a Japanese girl and baby.
The identical month, 4 academics from a US school had been knifed in a park in Jilin in northeastern China. In September a stabbing close to a college for Japanese youngsters in Shenzhen, during which a toddler was killed, added to issues. There have additionally been a number of related assaults focusing on Chinese language nationals across the nation, together with in Shanghai, Jiangxi and Yunnan.
Zhuhai police mentioned their investigation into the Zhuhai incident confirmed it was pushed by the alleged attacker’s dissatisfaction with how he and his ex-wife’s property had been divided of their divorce.
They added that Fan was harming himself with a knife within the automobile when discovered. He sustained extreme accidents to his neck and different areas, inflicting a coma that prevented him from being interrogated.
One on-line commentator mentioned the incident occurred solely 1km from their dwelling and “the sound of ambulances stuffed all the space”. “The hospitals had been stuffed with Zhuhai residents donating blood” afterwards, the commentator mentioned.
