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Eat your vegetables
Super Moderator
Location: Arabidopsis-ville
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Here's another article on the matter:
Killer in China School Stabbing Knew His Victims - NYTimes.com
Quote:
Killer in China School Stabbing Knew His Victims
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — The mystery over a series of vicious attacks on schoolchildren across China deepened Thursday, as reports emerged indicating that the latest and deadliest round of slaughter was committed not by a stranger to his victims, but rather a man well known to them and their families, someone probably seen near the school almost every day.
Meanwhile, in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang Province, police officers detained a woman Thursday morning after she stormed into a youth center brandishing a rusty knife, according to a worker at the center and photographs posted by a local newspaper. (By Thursday night, the photographs and an accompanying article had been removed form the newspaper’s Web site, possible in keeping with government pressure to mute coverage.)
The officers stopped the woman before she harmed anyone, and it was unclear what the woman had intended to do, the worker said in a telephone interview. The prior five attacks on schoolchildren were all committed by men.
The assailant in the Wednesday mayhem, Wu Huanming, 48, was the landlord of the Shengshui Temple private kindergarten and had been having frequent disputes with the school administrator, Wu Hongying, over when the school would move out of the building, Chinese news organizations said in early reports. So far, there are no suggestions that the two were related.
Mr. Wu barged into the school with a kitchen cleaver on Wednesday morning and hacked and killed Ms. Wu and a student, then wounded 18 other people, including Ms. Wu’s 80-year-old mother. She and six pupils died of their injuries. Mr. Wu killed himself at his home.
The attack, in the village of Linchang in Shaanxi Province, was the deadliest of five attacks in the past two months on students by middle-aged men armed with knives or tools, and it left many Chinese, from top security officials to fearful parents, scrambling for explanations. Seventeen people have been killed and nearly 100 wounded in the attacks.
They appear to be copycat crimes, with no discernible pattern beyond the most basic — adults attacking defenseless children within schools.
Nor did the descriptions of Mr. Wu that emerged on Thursday immediately suggest any broader insights. He seemed to know his victims, in particular Ms. Wu, and had a wife and two adult sons whom the other residents of Linchang knew.
Zhao Fangling, vice director of the hospital where five of the wounded children were in an intensive care unit on Thursday, said by telephone that the young victims were familiar with the attacker.
“You know, they are from the same small village,” she said.
The police took in Mr. Wu’s parents, his wife and his sons for questioning, according to a report in the English-language edition of Global Times, a state-run newspaper.
People in the village spoke of Mr. Wu being mild-mannered and kind, if a bit withdrawn. A Hong Kong newspaper, Ta Kung Pao, which sent two reporters to the village on Wednesday, said that Mr. Wu and his wife ran small businesses and made good money. One of their sons attends university in the city of Xi’an, and the other is an adult who is mentally handicapped, the newspaper said. Other online reports carried the same details.
Ta Kung Pao also reported that Mr. Wu had diabetes and had recently been found to have late-stage prostate cancer, though the newspaper did not name sources for that information, and none of it could be independently verified.
An Associated Press reporter in the village spoke to a man, Zhen Xiulan, 71, who said he had known Mr. Wu his entire life.
“This kid was very honest and didn’t talk much,” Mr. Zhen said. “He had a very soft and gentle personality and didn’t have mental problems that we knew of.”
“None of us would ever have imagined he would do something so terrible,” he added.
Police officers followed journalists around Linchang and kept them away from some areas. One news crew was ejected from a hotel, The A.P. reported. Local and central government officials have tried to clamp down on news coverage of the attacks, and the official Chinese-language news organizations on Thursday did not report new details of the Linchang killings. Most Chinese news Web sites had deeply buried the initial reports from Wednesday. The ostensible purpose is to avert further copycat crimes.
The series of attacks, which began on March 23 when a man stabbed and killed eight schoolchildren, have prompted calls by some writers and scholars for government officials to examine deeper problems within Chinese society, thus presenting a challenge to Chinese leaders.
At least one provincial newspaper has said that censoring news reports and adding security to schools failed to address the fundamental problems.
In Hunan Province, officials have posted police officers with submachine guns at the gates of some schools; the sight is so bizarre in China that photos have spread quickly online.
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"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq
"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy
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