Police hunt for man punching pregnant women
Shanghai Daily, March 28, 2014
Police are searching for a man who punched three pregnant women in the belly and threatened a fourth over two weeks in Xi’an, the provincial capital of western China’s Shaanxi Province, the provincial TV station reported.
A mobile phone photo taken by one of the victims of the suspected attacker. Police have launched a probe after the man was believed to have punched three pregnant women in the belly and harassed a fourth in Xi’an recently.
One of the victims had a small amount of internal bleeding but the fetus was unhurt, while the others had no serious injuries.
In some cases, he waited outside maternity clinics for his victims, and in at least one case, he followed a woman and kept telling her to “Be careful.”
The incidents have been traced back to March 12, when a pregnant woman, surnamed Ye, was followed and threatened. The other three attacks took place on March 19, 21, and 24, the report said, based on interviews with the victims.
The three physical attacks were similar in style. The victims, all walking alone on the street, said a man suddenly punched them violently in the abdomen and ran away.
It’s likely the man had also attempted to attack Ye but the victim was alert enough and chose to move into a crowd, which may have saved her from being attacked, the report said.
“We were crossing the street together. And he kept saying ‘Be careful!’ and asked how long am I pregnant,” she said.
The scared woman then moved into a small crowd of passengers waiting at the bus station. “He still stayed there, murmuring to me to ‘Be careful’!” The man even followed her onto the bus later before disappearing, she said.
Another victim, surnamed Zhou, said she had an eye-to-eye encounter with the man during the attack of March 19.
“He is less than 1.7 meters tall, thin and looked pale. The man is also a bit cross-eyed,” she said.
Accounts from the other victims pointed to the same physical characters as Zhou had recalled.
Some of the women were attacked outside a local maternity hospital.
Police have been alerted and an investigation is underway.
Zhong Yijuan, a local psychiatrist, told reporters the attacker might have some mental problems based on the style of his behavior but there was no evidence he was a mental patient.
