Updated on: 10th July 2023 01:33 PM IST | Mumbai
S S Nadar | news@debotimes.in

Three children among the dead in the attack, which took place in Lianjiang in southern Guangdong province.

Six people, including three children, have been killed and one injured in a stabbing at a kindergarten in southern China, according to an official.

A spokeswoman for the city government said the attack took place in Lianjiang in Guangdong province on Monday.

“The victims include one teacher, two parents and three students… and one suspect has been arrested,” she told the AFP news agency.

The BBC also reported the incident, citing local police who said the attack took place at 7.40am (23:40 GMT on Sunday), and the suspect – a 25-year-old man with the family name Wu – was arrested 20 minutes later.

Police have classified the case as “intentional assault”, the report added.

The incident was the top-trending discussion on the social media platform Weibo, with 130 million views as of 12.20pm (04:20 GMT), but videos shot by passersby claiming to show the crime scene were removed from Weibo as well as video-sharing platform Douyin.

China has seen a number of stabbing attacks in schools in recent years, despite government efforts to improve security.

Last August, three people were killed after an attack in southern Jiangxi province that also targeted a nursery school.

In April 2021, two children were killed and 16 others wounded when a knife-wielding man entered a kindergarten in southern China.

In June of the previous year, 37 students and two adults were wounded by a knife-wielding attacker at a primary school in southern China.

And in November 2019, a man climbed a kindergarten wall in southwest Yunnan province and sprayed people with a corrosive liquid, injuring 51 of them, mostly students.

The same year, eight schoolchildren died and two others were wounded in a “school-related criminal case” in the central Hubei province, with a 40-year-old man arrested.

And in April 2018, a 28-year-old man killed nine college students and injured 12 others outside their school in the northern province of Shaanxi.

The attacker later said he acted out of revenge after being harassed by a student at the same school.