BEIJING — The attacker in the deadliest of the rampages that have terrorized China’s schools was identified Wednesday as 48-year-old Wu Huanmin, who owned the building that housed the Linchang Village Kindergarten, 100 miles southwest of Xian in Shaanxi province, according to the state-run Xinhua news service.
He killed seven children and two adults with a meat cleaver before going home and killing himself.
Wu burst into the school about 8 a.m. as the children were arriving. Out of a class of 23 children, all between the ages of 3 and 6, all but three were killed or injured. He also killed the school’s administrator and the administrator’s mother.
The killings deepened the despair in China over the seemingly unstoppable string of attacks on schools. Since March 23, when an unemployed doctor stabbed to death eight children in Nanping City, Fujian province, children in small towns around the country have been stabbed, hacked, bludgeoned and burned, with each new incident apparently inspiring others.
“The atmosphere is very bad these days. People are really terrified,” said a doctor who gave her name as Yu from the Shankou Village Medical Clinic, which is located near the school that was attacked. She said she was leaving early to pick up her 8-year-old grandson from school.
Police and school officials seem to be powerless to stop the violence. A week before this latest attack, the county where the preschool is located held a major conference on improving school security.
“It is mission impossible to prevent these attacks in the short term,” said Liu Shanying, a political scientist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “More and more people have been inspired to copy what the others have done, and it very difficult to stop them,”
In large cities, police and paramilitary have been assigned to patrol schools at opening and closing times and closed-circuit cameras have been installed in some locations. Guards have been trained to use batons and pipes against knife-wielding assailants.
Some analysts have suggested that the attacks are an extreme form of social protest in a country where demonstrations are forbidden and grievances are handled with an archaic system in which the aggrieved write up petitions to party officials. Experts say that because the assailants haven’t gotten hold of guns, strictly controlled in China, they have tended to go after victims who are as defenseless as possible.
