Child stabbed to death near Japanese school in China

An elementary school student was stabbed and injured near Japanese educational institutions in China on Wednesday, the latest in a series of knife attacks on foreigners.

“A 10-year-old student at a Japanese school in Shenzhen was stabbed to death by a man about 200 meters from the school gate,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian.

Jian added that the student was immediately taken to a hospital and the suspected attacker was arrested on the spot.

According to a Japanese government source, the student was on his way to school when he was stabbed. His condition is currently stable.

According to a police report from a district in Shenzhen where a Japanese school is located, the attack on the child occurred around 8 a.m. According to the report, the attacker's surname is Zhong and he is 44 years old. The report did not specify a motive for the attack.

At a press conference, Jian said the case was “still under investigation” and China would “continue to take effective measures to protect the safety of all foreigners.”

This latest knife attack follows two knife attacks on foreigners in June. On June 11, four lecturers from a US college in northeast China were attacked as they walked through a park. The Chinese Foreign Ministry described this as an isolated incident.

Two weeks later, a man attacked a Japanese school bus in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou. A Japanese mother and her child were injured, and a Chinese woman who tried to stop the attacker died.

Japan's Deputy Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Moriya said Japan had requested detailed information about the stabbing and urged Beijing to prevent a repeat of such attacks.

At a press conference, Moriya added: “Japan will continue to work closely with the Chinese authorities and make every effort to ensure the safety of its nationals living abroad.”

Other Japanese schools in China advised their students to be cautious. The Japanese school in Guangzhou, about 140 kilometers from Shenzhen, asked parents to accompany their children to and from school for the rest of the week and to avoid speaking Japanese loudly in public.

Earlier this year, Japan subsidized bus security for Japanese schools in China for the first time. The Japanese Foreign Ministry applied for about US$2.5 million in government subsidies to hire school bus security personnel in China.

Wednesday marked the 93rd anniversary of the bombing of a Chinese railway junction, which Japan used as a pretext for invading northeast China in 1931. Historians estimate that nearly 14 million Chinese were killed in the invasion and another 100 million became refugees in the war that followed.

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