‘Terrorist attack’: 27 dead in China rail station stabbings

BEIJING:

A mass stabbing at a train station in China’s Yunnan province late on Saturday left 27 people dead and 109 injured, state media reported.

Victims said knife-wielding attackers dressed in black burst into Kunming railway station and started slashing indiscriminately. The incident “was an organised, premeditated violent terrorist attack” carried out by “unidentified knife-wielding people,” the official news agency Xinhua said, citing authorities.

Police shot dead a number of the perpetrators at the train station, according to posts by local television station K6 on its official Sina Weibo account, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Officers sealed off a wide area around the station, it added, while Xinhua said they were still questioning people at the site.

Meanwhile, ambulances had delivered the injured to hospitals around the city, K6 reported.

The attackers carried knives and were dressed in similar black clothing, the official China News Service said, citing eyewitnesses.

“A group of men carrying weapons burst into the train station plaza and the ticket hall, stabbing whoever they saw,” it said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2014.