8 children hurt in China school attack

Eight children were hurt when an employee at a child-care centre for migrant workers in the Chinese city of Shanghai slashed them with a knife, local media reports say. The attack happened around midday in the city's Minhang district. Reports said the attacker, a woman, had been taken into custody by police. In 2010 there were a series of attacks in which lone individuals broke into Chinese schools to attack students. In one attack in March 2010 in the city of Ninping, community doctor Zheng Minsheng stabbed eight young children to death. He was executed for the crime one month later. Two months later, seven children and two adults were hacked to death at a kindergarten in Hanzhong city by an attacker who later killed himself. The attacks led to calls for heightened security at schools and kindergartens, and sparked debate over what had caused them. The Xinmin Evening News said that the woman used a box-cutter to slash the children, who were all three or four years old. One of the children was seriously injured, the paper said. It added that the woman, who had worked at the centre for several years, was thought to have psychiatric problems.