A small child and two women were injured when a man, who appeared to be armed with a knife, attacked a bus used by a Japanese school in Suzhou, eastern China on Monday, according to Tokyo’s consulate in Shanghai.
According to a Reuters report, the Japanese woman was standing at the bus stop with her preschool aged child when the attack occurred. Neither were seriously injured. A Chinese woman who was on the bus is in a critical condition.
All three are currently being treated in hospital while the man has been taken into custody, the official said. Chinese authorities have not yet issued a statement on the incident.
A receptionist at the consulate told the South China Morning Post that all staff were busy and that it would be “inconvenient” for them to receive further calls on the matter.
This is the second attack involving foreign residents in China this year. Earlier this month, four American instructors on an exchange visit from Cornell College were attacked in a park in the northeastern province of Jilin.
In that incident, a 55-year-old man was taken into custody but his motives remain unclear. According to local police, the attacker was walking in the park when he “bumped into a foreigner then stabbed them with a knife”,
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said initial investigations into the Jilin attack concluded that it was an “isolated incident that would not affect the normal development of China-US cultural exchanges”.
