Latest news Japanese student attacked with knife in China

A man has injured a boy from Japan with a knife on his way to school in the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen.

Shortly after the attack in the morning (local time), the police arrested a 44-year-old suspect, the authorities announced. The boy was taken to hospital.

According to the Chinese Foreign Affairs Office, the ten-year-old Japanese boy was only 200 meters away from the school gate when the attack happened. The case is still under investigation, said spokesman Lin Jian. China will continue to take measures to ensure the safety of foreigners in the People's Republic, he said. Japan urged its compatriots to ensure their own safety and watch out for suspicious persons, according to a statement from the Japanese embassy in China.

Previous attack on Japanese

Sino-Japanese relations have historically been heavily strained by wars. Hate comments against Japan are repeatedly posted on China's social media. However, Chinese censors stopped this in a rare case at the end of June, when a man in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou attacked and injured a Japanese mother and her child with a knife. A Chinese woman who intervened at the time later died of her injuries and was celebrated as a heroine. The Weibo platform, China's X, removed almost 760 posts that celebrated crimes in the name of patriotism, among other things.

The background to the crime in Shenzhen was initially unclear. September 18, the day of the attack, was at least the 93rd anniversary of the bombing of a railroad route near the present-day city of Shenyang in northeast China. That attack in 1931 heralded a crisis between Japan and the then Republic of China - not to be confused with today's People's Republic of China - in which Japan occupied resource-rich Manchuria.

SDA