China School Knife Attack Leaves 13 Wounded

Updated at 7:12 a.m. Eastern.

At least five men armed with knives burst into the dormitory of a vocational college Wednesday and slashed nine students, one of them seriously, sparking new fears in a country on edge over a series of shocking rampages, many of them at schools.

Four students had been wounded in an earlier confrontation between the two groups, bringing the total injured to 13.

The pre-dawn attack took place in Haikou, the capital of the southern island province of Hainan, when five or six men burst into a dormitory at the Hainan Institute of Science and Technology and slashed the students, the China News Service reported.

It said eight were wounded slightly, while one's hand was cut off.

Two students remained hospitalized with wounds that were not life-threatening, the reports said.

Because it was a vocational college, the students would have been much older than the children targeted in a string of attacks at schools across China in the last two months.

The reports said the violence began with a confrontation late Tuesday between some of the college's students eating at a food stall outside the school and men from the surrounding villages. Such schools usually attract students in their late teens and early twenties.

Four of the students were attacked with knives and police were called, but left after questioning the students, the reports said. The villagers then called for reinforcements and attacked the school at about 2:30 a.m. (1830 GMT), the reports said.

A spokesman for the Hainan provincial government confirmed the report but said he had no additional information. The official Xinhua News Agency put the number of attackers at more than 10 and said they first assaulted a guard and disabled security cameras before rushing into two dormitories where lights remained on and hacking away apparently at random.

The attack follows five separate assaults by lone assailants against schoolchildren as young as three in the last two months that have left 17 dead and more than 50 wounded, including some adults.

An attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven ,children and two adults at a kindergarten in northwest China last week. Eleven other children were wounded.

The violence has resulted in a boost of security at schools across China, with nervous parents accompanying students to school and police and security guards posted at entrances.

While revenge was the apparent motive in the latest attack, previous rampages have involved apparently deranged people seeking to vent their rage on innocent victims with whom they had little or no connection.

Sociologists say those attacks reflect a failure to diagnose and treat mental illness, along with anger and frustration among people who feel victimized by China's high-stress, fast-changing society. Experts say the frequency of the attacks and choice of schoolchildren as the main victims suggest a copycat element.

In a similar incident, a cleaver-wielding man killed one woman and wounded five at a market in the southern province of Guangdong on Sunday before jumping to his death.

While the man appeared to have deliberately targeted women, it was not immediately clear what triggered the attack.