44 school kids stabbed in China in 2 days (Second Lead)

BEIJING - Twenty-eight children were stabbed Thursday by a 47-year-old man at a kindergarten in China’s Jiangsu province, a day after 16 primary school students were attacked by a mentally-unstable man in Guangdong province.

An unemployed man, identified Xu Yuyuan, carried out the attack at 9.30 a.m. local time Thursday in Zhongxin Kindergarten in Jiangsu’s Taixing city, in which two teachers and a security guard were also injured, Xinhua quoted government officials as saying.

Wednesday, a mentally-unstable 33-year-old man, named Chen Kangbing, had stabbed 16 students and a teacher at the Leicheng First Primary School in Guangdong province’s Leizhou city.

Thursday’s attacker Xu worked in an insurance company until he was fired in 2001. Since then, he has remained jobless, they said.

The children have been admitted in hospital and five of them are in a critical condition. Many of the injured children were four years old and studied in the same class.

Xu broke into the kindergarten classroom wielding a 20-cm-long knife and attacked the children and the two teachers. The security guard was injured when he tried to stop the man, police said.

Meanwhile, five of the injured students in the Guangdong attack were still critical Thursday.

Authorities were assessing the mental state of Chen, an art teacher at Hongguan Primary School, in Leizhou city.

Chen had been on sick leave since February 2006, showed an inability to answer questions clearly, and was receiving a comprehensive psychiatric examination from the city public security bureau, Li Changwu, secretary of the city committee of the Communist Party of China, was quoted as saying Thursday.

He had “sneaked into the campus” with teachers from different schools who had come to attend a class on teaching methods at the school, Chen Riwen, spokesman with the provincial education department said.

One of the students injured in the attack said he tumbled and hurt himself when he tried to escape. “I hid under the table in the classroom when he struck the knife. I didn’t feel any pain at the time,” Xiao Huang said.

He said his teacher blocked Chen and shouted “Run, Run!” to the students in the classroom.

Meanwhile, Xiao Wen, 12, was critically injured and was receiving a blood transfusion and oxygen for breathing, her father said, adding that she received cerebral injuries and suffered heavy blood loss.

Earlier, a mentally-unstable doctor who had stabbed eight schoolchildren to death in China’s Fujian province was executed Wednesday. He was put in front of the firing squad.

Zheng Minsheng, 41, who murdered the eight children March 23 at the gate of the Nanping Experimental Elementary School, had admitted in court that he “intentionally” killed them.

Zheng had asked the court to pay more attention to what prompted him to commit the crime, rather than to the crime itself. “I’m willing to shoulder the responsibility for what I did, but only for 30 percent. The other 70 percent should go to the woman who dumped me,” he was quoted as saying.

The doctor said he just wanted an ordinary life like others, but failed. He felt his life was meaningless as he was not married, had been unsuccessful in relations with women, his family and in his career. He repeatedly told the judge that he had been turned down by a woman and suffered unfair treatment from her wealthy family, which prompted him to carry out the attack.