By Jane Macartney in The Times, Jan 2
Beijing: Nine people asleep on a train travelling through northeastern China were stabbed in the early hours of this morning by a woman armed with a 15-cm-long knife.
The woman struck at around 2am, slashing at passengers sleeping in the lower bunks of a carriage and causing widespread panic in the darkness, as the K7019 train from the northeastern city of Harbin to northern Hebei province chugged south.
One man, identified only as Mr Wang, said he was awoken when he felt a sudden pain in his leg. In the gloom he made out the plump figure of a short-haired woman moving towards the neighbouring lower bunk and holding a knife.
He heard screams and realised the woman was attacking other passengers. Many people were sleepy and confused and did not realize what was happening. When it became clear that an attacker was on the loose, several gathered together and rushed the woman, knocking the knife out of her hand.
Mr Wang said: “I leapt up to help people to capture the woman. Then I realised that one of my legs felt really cold and I looked down and saw that it was bleeding from a deep cut.”
When the conductor finally turned on the main lights, which are turned off at 11pm leaving travellers with a small bedhead lamp, it was found that nine people had been wounded.
Another traveller, Mr Song, said his 70-year-old sister had suddenly woken him up in the darkness saying that her shoulder hurt and that something must have dropped on her from an upper bunk. With the light from his mobile phone, Mr Song saw that nothing had fallen but that his sister was bleeding from a 2-cm-long cut to her shoulder.
Mr Wang said: “We didn’t have any medicines but other passengers brought out alcohol that they were carrying as well as cloths and we made makeshift bandages to stop the bleeding of the wounded people.”
The woman, who was described as being in her 40s but was otherwise not identified, was handcuffed by train security guards between two carriages.
The train stopped at the next station where the wounded passengers were transferred to hospital for treatment. Police took away the attacker.
Violent crime, long rare in tightly controlled Communist China, has surged in recent months. Just a day earlier, a bank guard opened fire with a rifle in a court building in central China, shooting dead three judges and wounding three people before turning a pistol on himself. Zhu Jun, 46, had been angered by a ruling by another court on the division of assets in his divorce three years earlier.
China has been rocked by a series of brutal attacks on young schoolchildren around the country since March that have left 17 people dead, 15 of them young pupils. Scores have been wounded.
The attacks have triggered intense debate about the motives of the assailants and the reasons for the violence. The Government recently announced it would set up state-run mental hospitals in all of its 31 provinces, from 22 currently, to try to meet the needs of those with psychological problems.
Be First to Comment