A man died on Friday after setting himself on fire following a hammer attack that injured five children at a Chinese kindergarten in the third attack on schoolchildren in three days in the country, state media said.
The man attacked the children with a hammer before grabbing two of them and pouring petrol over himself at the Shangzhuang Primary School in the eastern city of Weifang in Shandong province.
Teachers rescued the two captive children before the man burned to death, the official Xinhua news agency quoted a city government spokesman as saying.
Police identified the attacker as local farmer Wang Yonglai. They said Wang broke into the school on Friday morning by smashing a gate with his motorcycle.
He also injured a teacher who tried to block him, the agency said.
Hospital doctors said the five injured children were all in stable condition with non—life—threatening injuries.
The attack followed another on Thursday in which a middle—aged man stabbed 28 children and three adults at a kindergarten in the eastern province of Jiangsu, leaving at least five people in critical condition.
On Wednesday, an art teacher reportedly on sick leave for mental health problems stabbed 16 pupils and one teacher at a primary school in the southern city of Leizhou in Guangdong province, reports said.
