A primary student was stabbed and wounded Wednesday near Japanese educational facilities in China, in the latest of a string of knife attacks targeting foreigners.
“A 10-year-old student of a Japanese school in Shenzhen was stabbed by a man about 200 meters from the school gate,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian.
Jian added that the student was immediately transported to a hospital and that the accused assailant was arrested on the spot.
According to a Japanese government source the student was on his way to school when stabbed. The student is currently in stable condition.
A police report from a district in Shenzhen that has a Japanese school says the attack on the child occurred around 8 a.m. The report says the assailant’s surname is Zhong and that he is aged 44. The report did not detail any motive for the attack.
At a press conference Jian said the case is “still under investigation” and that China will “continue to take effective measures to protect the safety of all foreigners.”
This latest stabbing follows two knife attacks on foreigners in June. On June 11th, four instructors from a U.S. college in northeastern China were attacked when walking through a park, in what China’s Foreign Ministry called an isolated event.
Two weeks after that, a man attacked a bus used by a Japanese school in the eastern city of Suzhou, leading to injuries for a Japanese mother and child along with the death of a Chinese woman who tried to stop the assailant.
Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Moriya said Japan has requested detailed information about the stabbing and called for Beijing to prevent such an attack to happen again.
Moriya added that “Japan will continue to work closely with the Chinese authorities and make every effort to ensure the safety of its overseas nationals,” at a press conference.
Other Japanese schools in China advised their students to be careful. The Guangzhou Japanese school, located about 86 miles from Shenzhen, requested parents to accompany their children to and from school for the rest of the week and avoid speaking Japanese loudly in public spaces.
Earlier this year, for the first time, Japan subsidized bus security for Japanese schools in China, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested around $2.5 million in government subsidies to hire security guards for school buses in China.
Wednesday marked the 93rd anniversary of a train railway bombing that Japan used as a pretext for invading northeastern China in 1931. Historians estimate that the invasion led to the deaths of nearly 14 million Chinese and 100 million more becoming refugees in the war that followed.
