Beijing Man Slashes School Kids

A school employee with a history of schizophrenia slashed 15 students and three teachers with a kitchen knife Wednesday at a Beijing kindergarten, killing one child and leaving terrified classmates covered in blood, police and news reports said.

Two children suffered serious injuries in the attack at the school run by the No. 1 Hospital of elite Peking University, police said. The wounded were taken down the street to the hospital, located in an affluent neighborhood less than a half mile from the compound in central Beijing where China's leaders work.

The incident took place in one of the country's most privileged neighborhoods. It is a blow to the communist leadership's effort to promote an image of order in the capital amid rising fears of crime and violence.

Police said they rushed to the school after getting reports at 9:36 a.m. that a man was attacking children with a vegetable knife.

They arrested Xu Heping, a 51-year-old man who was working part-time as a gatekeeper, police spokesman Liu Wei said.

Xu had been hospitalized for schizophrenia for five months in 1999 at another hospital in Beijing, Liu said. He said Xu began working at the school two years ago.

Police wouldn't say how many children were in the school at the time of the attack. Most Chinese students are off for summer vacation.

Citing a reporter at the hospital where the injured were taken, the official Xinhua News Agency said the children were "covered in blood and looked terrified."

Kindergarten children in China are generally ages 5 to 6, though younger children may have been at the school Wednesday because of summer. Police refused to release additional information. Hospital employees wouldn't comment.

The kindergarten and hospital are near the compound where President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders live and work — just west of the former imperial palace, where China's emperors lived for five centuries.

The kindergarten serves children of hospital employees, though many high-level officials also live in the area. It wasn't clear if the children of any top officials were at the school.

The tree-lined street in front of the kindergarten was cordoned off with yellow police tape Wednesday and a small crowd of onlookers gathered behind it.

One man said he helped police escort injured teachers to the hospital after hearing the commotion.

"I saw the children lying on the ground. There was blood on the floor," said the man, who identified himself only as Mr. Xu, a common Chinese surname.

China's leadership takes pains to portray the country as a safe place, where an increasingly well-off population reaps the rewards of government-led economic growth. A spate of serial murders, gangland bombings and mass poisonings over the past several years threaten to undermine that message.
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