Dozens of injuries are feared after a car plowed into a crowd of people outside a primary school in China’s Hunan province.
There are no details of the injured yet but state media said “a number of students and adults were injured and fell to the ground”, while a number of people were in hospital.
The driver of the car – identified as a white SUV – was caught by parents and school guards and handed over to the police.
It is the third mob attack in China in less than a week, and has raised concerns about public safety.
“About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously, but luckily an ambulance arrived quickly,” Mr Zhu, a parent of one of the school’s children, told the BBC.
He said he heard the attack when he left the school premises, after leaving his eight-year-old child.
“Six or seven parents forced the car of the person who hit the others to stop. Even the security guard fell over. This security guard is very old, in his 70s or 80s, there is nothing he can do,” he said.
The school has been identified as Yong’an Primary School in Dingcheng County, Hunan Province.
A video of the scene posted on a private WeChat account shows some children lying on the ground, while others, carrying school bags, are running away in fear.
Another video recorded after the incident shows an angry pedestrian hitting the SUV with a snow shovel while the driver was inside.
The driver is then seen getting out of the other side of the car, and he is surrounded by people who immediately start beating him with sticks.
A similar attack in recent days has sparked discussions on the Internet about the social phenomenon “social revenge“, where people make their complaints about attacking strangers.
On Saturday, eight people died and 17 others were injured during a knife attack at a school in eastern China. The police said that the suspect is 21 years old and was a student at this school who was going to graduate this year but failed.
Before that, on November 12, at least 35 people were killed car attacks in southern Chinawhen a man runs in groups of people exercising on a sports track.
In October, in Shanghai, a man killed three people and injured 15 others in a stabbing attack at a supermarket.
According to the police report, there have been 19 incidents of indiscriminate violence this year in China where the perpetrator of the crime is unknown to the dead. Sixty-three people died and 166 were injured in the attack. This has increased significantly in recent years – 16 dead and 40 injured in 2023, for example.
While these incidents are still random and rare, they are on the high side. And videos that often spread quickly on social media have caused anxiety and fear in people.
“These are signs of a society with many closed grievances,” Lynette Ong, professor emeritus of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto in Canada, told AFP.
“Some people choose to stop. Others, when they are angry, want to take revenge.”
The recession, high youth unemployment and a property crisis that has hurt savings have led to growing uncertainty about the future among Chinese people.
Ong said, in circumstacnes, violent attacks were “the negative side of the same coin”.
President Xi Jinping ordered local officials to ensure security and “social stability” and “resolutely defend against serious crimes”.
Officials are determined to show that they act quickly. They worry that such a high number of casualties in a single year could raise questions about China’s safety record, continue to scare people and discourage tourism.
The Communist Party has rapidly increased surveillance in recent years and after last week’s attack on vehicles in Zhuhai, there were further orders to deploy local officials and civil servants to try to prevent clashes.
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