At least seven students were stabbed to death and twelve others injured Friday in an attack outside a school in northern China.
The suspect is in police custody and the injured students are receiving treatment at a nearby hospital, the propaganda department of Mizhi County in Shaanxi Province reported on its social-media account.
Social-media posts from the scene depict students lying in the street covered in blood while police detain the suspect, who is a former student, according to the Beijing news site Jiemian.com. The victims’ exact ages have not been released, but reports suggest that they are middle-school students.
China has struggled with a trend of mass stabbings in recent years, many of them targeting schools. At least 25 students were killed and more than 100 were injured in a series of unconnected knife attacks at Chinese schools between 2010 and 2012. In February of this year, an assailant killed one and injured twelve at a Beijing mall. And in the most deadly incident of late, three men stabbed 29 people to death and wounded more than 100 others at a train station in Kunming in 2015. The three men were found guilty of terrorism and murder and were executed.