Two dead and 21 injured in knife attack on hospital in China

At least two people were killed and another 21 injured in a knife attack at a hospital in China’s southwestern Yunnan province on Tuesday, according to local authorities.

The attack happened just before noon at Chengnan Hospital in Zhenxiong, the county public security bureau said in a statement.

A 40-year-old man was arrested and the case is under investigation, local police said.

Authorities said they did not know the motive for the attack.

The alleged attacker’s cousin said he was previously sentenced to three years in prison for injuring others in a dispute over a motorcycle transaction, the state-run Henan Daily newspaper reported.

“Before he was imprisoned, his character was still good. He always behaved well. But after he came out, he felt he had been wronged,” the cousin was quoted as saying.

The report has since been deleted from Chinese news platforms, where censors routinely delete content.

Another report by Cover News, a state media outlet, confirmed, citing a court document, that the suspect was sentenced to three years in prison in 2013 for “intentional wounding.”

China, where private gun ownership is illegal for most civilians, has seen a spate of mass stabbings in public places in recent years.

Last year, six people were killed and one injured in an early morning knife attack outside a kindergarten in Guangdong, southern China. A 2020 knife attack at a primary school in the southern Guangxi region injured 37 children and two adults, while a 2022 knife attack, also at a kindergarten, left three people dead and six injured in the eastern Jiangxi province.

Yunnan was also the scene of a knife attack at a train station in the provincial capital Kunming in 2014, in which multiple attackers killed 33 people and injured 133. Authorities blamed terrorists from the northwestern Xinjiang region for the attack.

Violence in hospitals is also not uncommon in China, where healthcare professionals have faced attacks from patients or their families in the past, often over concerns about high costs and standards of care.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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