At least two people have been killed and another 21 injured in a knife attack in a hospital in Yunnan, southwest China.
The attack happened at a local hospital in Zhenxiong county at around 11.37am, when an as yet unnamed male suspect went on a rampage.
He has since been arrested, according to the state-run news site The Paper, but no motive has been given for the attacks.
“According to investigations, the suspect is a male villager from Zhenxiong County’s Poji Town,” said the Zhenxiong county police office in a statement posted on its official WeChat account.
Witnesses spoke of chaotic scenes as the morning attack unfolded.
Images published by The Paper appeared to show a man dressed in dark clothes wielding a knife in each hand.
One witness told China’s Red Star News that he narrowly escaped the attack and that one or more doctors were among the injured.
Footage the witness recorded showed people bleeding and lying on the ground, with one older person trying to help another.
No motive identified
No details have been released about the identity of the injured. The police said they were receiving treatment and that investigations were ongoing.
Although guns are illegal in China, the country has been confronted by a series of mass stabbings in recent years.
In 2014, China was horrified by another mass stabbing carried out by a group of eight knife-wielding attackers at a train station in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, that killed 31 people and injured 141.
The Chinese government blamed Islamic extremists from the western region of Xinjiang for the assault.
Knife attacks have often occurred at kindergartens. Last July, a man with a knife killed six people and wounded one other at a kindergarten in Guangdong province in the country’s southeast.
A man who injured 15 people, six seriously, in a knife attack at a Shanghai hospital in 2022, was sentenced to death last year.
Zhenxiong county, situated in Yunnan’s northeast, borders Guizhou and Sichuan provinces and lies 220 miles northeast of Kunming. Until 2020, it was classified as being “poverty stricken”.