A knife attack at a Chinese hospital kills 2 people and injures 21. The motive is unclear

BEIJING (AP) — A knife attack at a hospital in southwestern China on Tuesday killed two people and injured 21 others, authorities said.

No motive was given for the attack at Zhenxiong County People’s Hospital in Yunnan province. The suspect is a male from a village in the same county, a Zhenxiong police statement said. The injured were being treated, it said.

A witness told Red Star News, an online outlet, that he had narrowly escaped the attack and that a doctor or doctors were among the injured. Video from the witness showed people who were bleeding and had fallen to the ground, and one older person trying to help another, the Red Star social media post said.

Earlier media reports said 23 people had been injured, but the police statement said the total was 21. A video posted online by Guizhou Province Television showed a man being taken away by police.

Zhenxiong county is 360 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of the Yunnan provincial capital, Kunming, and near the border with Sichuan province.

Knife attacks have happened before in China, often at kindergartens. A man with a knife killed six people and wounded one other last July at a kindergarten in Guangdong province in the country’s southeast.

A man injured 15 people, six seriously, in a knife attack at a Shanghai hospital in 2022. He was sentenced to death last year.

The Associated Press