Police in southern China are searching for a man who allegedly killed three people and injured six at a kindergarten in the country’s southern Jiangxi province on Wednesday.
The 48-year-old suspect was identified by his surname Liu in a police statement. The brief statement gave no further details of Wednesday morning’s attack in the province’s Anfu county.
China stepped up security at schools after a series of deadly attacks in recent years largely attributed to people holding grudges against society or suffering from unidentified mental illnesses. China does not allow private gun ownership, so most of these attacks are carried out with knives, homemade explosives or petrol bombs.
Around 100 children and adults have been killed and hundreds injured over the past decade in apparently uncoordinated “lone wolf” attacks in which the motive was unclear and the mostly male attackers were killed, ending the their lives or were tried and executed.
Acts of violence against China’s youth resonate particularly strongly because of the country’s chronically low birth rate, in part due to decades of population control policies.