Knife Attack at Beijing's Xidan Joy City Shopping Mall Kills One
[This post contains graphic depictions of blood.]
A knife attack at a popular downtown Beijing shopping mall at the onset of the holiday season has claimed one fatality.
A suspect was apprehended after the attack took place Sunday afternoon at around 1pm on the lower level of the Joy City Mall, located in the busy Xidan shopping district.
One female victim succumbed to her injuries and died, reports Phoenix Weekly.
Another nine women and three men have been admitted to a hospital and are receiving medical treatment for various injuries, none of which are life-threatening.
Police say the suspect, a 35-year-old man from Henan named Zhu, has fully confessed that he carried out the armed attack in order to vent his grievances upon society.
Besides the preliminary report seen on the official Weibo of the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB), not many details are known about Sunday's incident.
Photographs taken at the scene show a heavy police presence converging upon the Joy City Mall that includes officers equipped in SWAT gear. Meanwhile, other photographs show parts of the mall getting closed off at the same time as bloodstains are cordoned off by a line of chairs (shown below).
These screencaps (of a video since scrubbed from the net) show a red-armbanded individual using a stool to physically engage with the assailant as shoppers watch from the second floor above.
Two people, including a foreigner, were killed in a knife attack that took place at the Chaoyang location of Joy City in 2013. That same year, a knife attack at a Beijing Carrefour hypermart location injured four people.
Knife attacks, particularly those involving fatalities, are rare in Beijing. Over the past two years, we've only reported on a handful of local knife attacks that include fatalities at a Papa John's restaurant and the Beijing Railway Station in 2016.
The knife attack comes at a time when Chinese media are routinely using expats to explain that "China is the safest city that I've ever lived in" (see video below) all the while local security forces continue to expand their numbers, their surveillance technology, and even their drone-enabled armaments.
Images: CNR (via weibo.com), Global Times (via weibo.com), Weibo.com
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