Chinese student kills eight in stabbing spree after failed exam

The knifeman was arrested at the scene and readily confessed to the murders, police have said

Eight people have been killed and 17 injured in a mass stabbing at a college campus in the eastern Chinese city of Yixing. The suspect was described by law enforcement as a student who failed his exams and returned to the college to take out his anger.

The attack took place on Saturday evening at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology in the city of Yixing in Jiangsu province. The 21-year-old suspect was arrested at the scene and confessed to the murders “without hesitation,” police in Yixing said in a statement shared with Chinese and international news outlets.

According to the statement, the perpetrator was a recent graduate and was upset at “failing [an] exam, not receiving a graduation certificate, and dissatisfaction with internship compensation.”

“He returned to the school to express his anger and commit these murders,” police said.

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The attack came five days after a man plowed his car into a crowd of people outside a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the attacker was enraged by a recent divorce. Just over a month earlier, a man killed three people and wounded 15 in a stabbing spree at a supermarket in Shanghai. A police investigation determined that the suspect flew into a rage due to “personal financial reasons.”

Firearms are strictly controlled in China. As such, acts of mass violence tend to involve knives. The most infamous of these incidents have all taken place at schools, with a 2012 massacre at Chenpeng Village Primary School in Henan province compared by Western media to the mass shooting that took place the same day at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the US state of Connecticut.

In both attacks, the killers managed to murder around two dozen people. Unlike in the case of Sandy Hook, the Chenpeng Village attacker was apprehended alive, and later sentenced to death.