Multiple Adults, Children Injured in Vehicle Collision Outside China’s Hunan Primary School

Police tape in a file photograph. Carl Ballou/Shutterstock

Multiple people, including children, were injured after a vehicle reportedly drove into a crowd of people outside a primary school in China’s central Hunan Province on Tuesday morning.

The collision occurred in front of Yongan Primary School in Dingcheng District, Changde, Hunan, at around 7:37 a.m., according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

The incident left many children and adults with injuries, although the exact number of casualties is still being determined, state-backed CCTV news reported.

Local authorities have not yet publicly commented on how many people were injured during the incident or revealed the identity of the driver, and it is not yet clear whether the vehicle lost control or if the crash was deliberate.

According to Xinhua, police arrested a 39-year-old male suspect with the surname Huang, and the incident remains “under further investigation.”

The individuals who were injured during the collision were taken to hospital for treatment and did not sustain life-threatening injuries, the news agency said.

Video footage circulating on social media platforms, verified by Reuters, shows children running with their school bags and screaming while a white vehicle remains stationary at the end of the street.

Multiple people also appear to be lying on the ground with injuries. Some of the children appear to be running back inside the education facility.

Further video footage appears to show a group of men beating up a man in front of a white vehicle. Multiple police officers can later be seen arriving at the scene.

Knife Attacks Rise in China

Just days before the incident, eight people were killed and 17 others injured during a mass stabbing rampage at a vocational college in eastern China.

Police arrested a 21-year-old male, identified only as Xu—a former student at the Wuxi Vocational College of Arts and Technology in Yixing in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province—at the scene. He later confessed to the killings, police said.

The suspect “attacked others after failing an exam and not receiving his graduation certificate, as well as being dissatisfied with his internship compensation,” the Yixing Public Security Bureau said in a statement.

The stabbing attack at the college came shortly after China was rocked by its deadliest attack in a decade when an elderly man allegedly plowed his vehicle into a crowd of people outside a sports stadium in Zhuhai, Guangzhou Province.

That incident left 35 people dead and another 43 injured.

Police later arrested the 62-year-old who they said was angry with the way financial assets were divided in his recent divorce.

Multiple high-profile knife attacks have been reported throughout China this year, including in September, when a 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death by a man outside a school in the southern part of the country.

Also in September, three people were killed and 15 injured in a knife attack at a Walmart supermarket in Shanghai.

Specific details regarding the attacks and their motivations have been difficult to verify, as the Chinese Communist Party has moved to censor online discussions regarding the incidents and taken down video footage posted to social media.

Melanie Sun and Reuters contributed to this report.