[Appeselve]

Three children killed in attack on Chinese kindergarten

Three children and a teacher have been stabbed to death in a knife attack at a kindergarten in eastern China in the latest in a series of killings that have provoked a bout of soul-searching over the social pressures of life in modern China.

By Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 7:00AM BST 04 Aug 2010



Zibo in Shandong province

The school attack – the eighth this year – took place at 4pm Tuesday afternoon when an unnamed man in his late twenties entered the kindergarten in the city of Zibo in Shandong province posing as a parent, according to reports from residents.

Up to 20 children and staff were injured in the attack, two of them seriously, with one teacher succumbing to her injuries on Wednesday morning. Local officials and police declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph, however a woman working in a restaurant opposite the Boshan District Experimental Kindergarten's Jinfengyuan branch said ambulances had rushed to the school.

"The kindergarten has been sealed off until now. There are still police officers there," the woman, who gave only her surname as Zhang told the Associated Press. An employee in the emergency room of the local hospital told The Telegraph that four teachers and four children were admitted after the attack, all with serious injuries and were immediately taken into surgery. Their current condition was unknown.

The killings come despite government orders to tighten security outside China's schools following a wave of knife attacks in April and May in which nearly 100 children and teachers were killed or injured. Despite the execution of several of the attackers and the imposition of reporting restrictions to reduce the likelihood of copycat attacks, the killings have continued.

On Sunday 17 people were killed in rural Yuanshi county in northern China's Hebei province when a drunken coal depot worker went on the rampage with his earthmover, flipping cars and crushing them beneath his wheels. A five-year-old was among the dead.

The school attacks, as well as other random killing-sprees in trains, courts and market-places have raised questions about China's capacity to deal with growing incidents of mental health problems and the social stresses caused by three decades of pell-mell economic growth. In May China's premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged publicly that the growing rich-poor divide and mounting discontent about levels of official corruption often provided the root-causes of such outbreaks of social instability and unrest.