Disturbed Ax-Wielding Farmer Kills Six in Central Chinese City

China Daily, via Reuters

BEIJING — A farmer described by the authorities as mentally ill rampaged through the streets of a city in central China with an ax on Wednesday morning, killing six people, two of them children, according to the state media.

The attack, in the city of Gongyi in Henan Province, was the latest in a series of attacks since last year that have killed more than two dozen people and wounded around 100, many of them children. The killings prompted the police to increase security near schools and highlighted the systemic lack of treatment for those with psychological problems.

The worst attacks took place during the spring of 2010, among them an assault in Jiangsu Province that left 28 kindergartners with stab wounds and another in Shaanxi Province that took nine lives, seven of them children. In a country where gun ownership is severely restricted, all of the attacks involved assailants wielding knives, meat cleavers, and other tools for hacking and slicing.

The authorities, citing the risk of copycats, have largely censored news of the attacks from the Internet.

Before Wednesday, the most recent assault had occurred late last month in a suburb of Shanghai, where a woman employed by at a day care center for migrant children slashed eight youngsters with a box cutter.

Officials in Gongyi, site of the Wednesday rampage, said the assailant, identified as Wang Hongbin, 30, killed two girls and four adults who had been escorting their children to the Tongxing Kindergarten around 8:40 a.m. The state news agency Xinhua said that Mr. Wang had a history of schizophrenia.

“We used mops to fend off the ax-wielding man and waited for the police to come,” a civil servant, Cao Jianli, said, according to Xinhua.

The authorities have shown little sympathy for those implicated in previous acts of violence against schoolchildren. Last year three of the attackers were sentenced to death after unusually speedy trials.