Six killed in central China as market dispute escalates into bloody knife attack
PUBLISHED : Friday, 14 March, 2014, 12:15pm
UPDATED : Friday, 14 March, 2014, 10:44pm
Keira Lu Huang and staff reporters [email protected]
Police stand guard in front of local residents near a crime scene on a street in Changsha. Photo: Reuters
A Weibo photo purportedly uploaded by an eyewitness showing one victim lying on the ground. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Five people were stabbed to death in a grocery market by a street peddler, who himself was shot dead by responding policemen in the central Chinese city of Changsha on Friday morning, said local police.
One street peddler killed another with a knife after a heated dispute, and then started hacking at innocent bystanders, killing two people and injuring two others, said the police department of Changsha, capital city of Hunan Province, in a statement posted on its official Weibo social media account on Friday.
Policemen who rushed to the scene shot and killed the attacker, it said. The two injured bystanders later died in a hospital. according to the police statement.
The names published by police of the two peddlers, the attacker and the first victim, seemed to indicate that they were both from the Uygur ethnic minority group, who live primarily in the restive western region of Xinjiang.
The two men were colleagues at a shop in the market selling naan, an oven-baked flatbread popular among Uygurs, according to other peddlers in the market.
A metal shop owner at the market told the Oriental Morning Daily that the attacker turned on his colleague with a long knife after an argument and "hacked crazily at him dozens of times" even after the victim fell to the floor.
Unverified eyewitness accounts and photos uploaded to Weibo showed that police had arrested at least one other man near the scene of the attack. It was unclear if the man was a suspect in the attack.
A Weibo photo purportedly uploaded by an eyewitness showing one victim lying on the ground. Photo: SCMP Pictures
The attack happened at a sensitive juncture as security was stepped up across the country following a shocking massacre by what authorities called "Xinjiang separatist terrorists" in the southwestern city of Kunming on March 1, in which 29 people were killed and more than 140 injured by knife-wielding, masked attackers.
Police shot dead four attackers and captured one female suspect at the scene, and announced later that they arrested three other suspects
The attack happened at a sensitive juncture as security was stepped up across the country following a shocking massacre by what authorities called "Xinjiang separatist terrorists" in the southwestern city of Kunming on March 1, in which 29 people were killed and more than 140 injured by knife-wielding, masked attackers.
Police shot dead four attackers and captured one female suspect at the scene, and announced later that they arrested three other suspects related to the attack.
