Nursery gatekeeper slashes 15 children

A SCHOOL employee with a history of schizophrenia slashed 15 students and three teachers with a kitchen knife yesterday at a Beijing kindergarten, killing one child and leaving terrified classmates covered in blood.

Two children suffered serious injuries in the attack at the school, police said. The wounded were taken to a local hospital in the affluent neighbourhood less than a half mile from the compound in central Beijing where China’s leaders work.

The attack 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 that a man was attacking children with a vegetable knife. They arrested Xu Heping, a 51-year-old who was working part-time as a gatekeeper at the school, police spokesman Liu Wei said. Mr Xu had been hospitalised for schizophrenia for five months in 1999 at another hospital in Beijing, Mr Liu said. He said Mr 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. A spokesperson at the hospital said the children were “covered in blood and looked terrified”.

Kindergarten children in China are generally ages five to six, though younger children may have been at the school because of the summer break.

One man said he helped police escort injured teachers to the hospital. “I saw the children lying on the ground. There was blood on the floor,” he said.

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