November 13, 2024
ZHUHAI – An aggrieved 62-year-old man drove a car into a crowd outside a sports hall in the southern coastal city of Zhuhai on Nov 11, killing at least 35 people in one of the worst attacks in the country in recent years.
The man, identified by local police only by his surname, Fan, rammed an SUV into a large group of people exercising around a track at the Zhuhai Sports Centre at 7.48pm on Monday.
Zhuhai police released a short statement late on Nov 11, saying the man tried to flee after ploughing into a large number of people, and was arrested. News of the hit-and-run incident was not widely reported until Nov 12 in the evening.
Videos taken at the scene, which have since been scrubbed from Chinese social media, showed multiple people lying around the track and shoes strewn across it.
A longer statement by the police on Nov 12 said 35 people had died and 43 were injured. When the police stopped him from driving away, he began to mutilate himself with a knife and passed out after cutting his own throat. He is undergoing emergency treatment and cannot be questioned, the police said in the statement.
Their initial investigation showed that Fan’s attack stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the distribution of matrimonial assets after his divorce, said the police.
President Xi Jinping has instructed “all-out efforts” to treat the wounded and to severely punish the perpetrator according to the law, reported Xinhua news agency.
The central government has sent a team to oversee the handling of the case, while President Xi has urged all the relevant authorities to “draw lessons from the case, to strengthen their prevention and control of risks at the source”, reported Xinhua.
The attack happened on the eve of China’s biggest bi-annual air show, which Zhuhai has hosted since 1996. More than 1,000 companies from nearly 50 countries have gathered in the city for the marquee event, which could explain the authorities suppressing news of the incident for a day.
There has been a series of stabbings in recent months in China. In September, a 10-year-old Japanese student was killed outside his school in Shenzhen by a 44-year-old man. In another incident in June, a man attacked a Japanese mother and her three-year-old son in Suzhou, causing the death of a Chinese bus attendant who tried to intervene.
Last month, a 50-year-old man wounded five people, including three minors, in a knife attack outside a primary school in Beijing.
When The Straits Times visited the Zhuhai Sports Centre late on Nov 12, its gates were shut but some people were milling outside, lighting candles and leaving flowers.
Staff members then brought the flowers to a restricted area in the sports centre, which only family members could access, and laid them on four long tables, they said.
Among them was Zhuhai resident Wei Qingjie, 28, who had grown up across the street from the stadium – where she played as a child – and knows people who had sustained mild injuries in the attack.
Of the perpetrator, she said: “I don’t know what he had gone through, to have had the kind of emotion to do this sort of thing, and hurt so many families.”
“The number of casualties is too high,” she said. “It’s very sad.”