Attacker knifes three at China train station

March 22, 2014 04:29 pm | Updated November 16, 2021 07:08 pm IST - Beijing

A knifeman injured two children and one elderly person Saturday at a railway station in central China, state media reported.

Members of the public and police seized the 31-year-old suspect after he allegedly attacked three passers-by at an exit of the Huaihua railway station in Hunan province.

The suspect, surnamed Chen, comes from the city of Ankang in north-western China’s Shaanxi province, the Xinhua news agency said.

Cities and railway stations remain on high alert after 29 people died and 143 were injured in a knife attack March 1 at a station in the south-western city of Kunming that the government blamed on ethnic Uighurs.

Saturday’s attack followed the fatal stabbing of a policeman by a man who was later shot dead Monday night in the city of Urumqi in China’s turbulent western region of Xinjiang, where most of the world’s Uighurs live.

Police identified the Urumqi attacker as a Uighur, US-based Radio Free Asia reported.

That attack came two days after five people were hacked to death and one fatally shot in a knife fight between two Uighur bakery shop workers in the central Chinese city of Changsha.

Many Uighurs in Xinjiang complain of cultural and religious repression, claiming that ethnic Han Chinese migrants enjoy the main benefits of development in the oil-rich but economically backward region.

The government accuses many Uighurs of separatism and terrorism, dating to China’s 1949 annexation of the Second East Turkestan Republic.

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