China suffers seventh attack as women hacked with meat cleaver

A man has hacked and wounded six young women with a meat cleaver in southern China in the latest of a spate of copycat knife attacks that have caused a growing security scare across the country.

Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 12:46PM BST 17 May 2010

The incident at a market in the city of Foshan in Guandong province, on Sunday, is the seventh such attack aimed at women and children in recent weeks, provoking questions about the stability of society in the 'new' China.

The attacker, named only as Mr Xie and aged in his 20s, apparently singled out young women as his victims, entering numerous shops and restaurants and hacking and slashing at the women's head and shoulders.

Five of the victims remain in hospital, two of them in intensive care, while the sixth was released after suffering light injuries to her left arm.

The attacker then escaped the scene, climbing to the top of a four-storey residential building a few hundred metres from the market and jumped to his death. Local police said they were still trying to find a motive for the attack.

The incident follows several multiple killings in recent weeks that have unsettled a country not known for violent crime.

Five of the incidents occurred at schools in China and took the lives of 17 people, including 15 children, as well as wounding 80 people.

In response, police and schools have been ordered to beef up security in and around campuses to prevent what experts believe are "copy-cat" attacks.

However the additional security measures have failed to prevent repeats of the attacks leaving parents increasingly jittery about the safety of their children.

In an indication of the heightened state of awareness around schools in China, police on Friday were called to a kindergarten in Haimen city in the southern province of Jiangsu after reports that a man had entered with a gun.

A squad of 20 policemen were dispatched to the kindergarten but the "attacker" later turned out to be a parent carrying a toy gun as a present for one of the children.

The attacks have raised questions in China about the impact of the country's rapid modernization, growing wealth inequalities and inadequate social safety net for catching socially outcast and mentally ill.

Last week China's prime minister Wen Jiabao admitted that the attacks reflected problems at the grass roots of Chinese society.

"We feel sorry in our hearts for the murders and the children's deaths. We need to not only adopt serious security measures but also tackle the deeper causes behind these problems," Mr Wen said in a television interview, "We must strengthen the role of [dispute] mediation at the grass roots. That's something we all have to work on."

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7732821/China-suffers-seventh-attack-as-women-hacked-with-meat-cleaver.html