Akashma Online News

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Akashma Online News

Source Asia Pacific News

A nurse attends to a girl after she was stabbed during a knife attack on December 14 at a primary school in Guangshan county, China’s Henan province. (AFP)

BEIJING: Chinese police have released surveillance video footage of a knife-wielding attacker who stabbed 22 students at a primary school last week, after the assault was given limited prominence in national media.

The grainy video shows a male attacker pursuing a group of children through a school gate and slashing one child with a knife, causing her to fall to the ground.

Panicked children then stream out of the school gates to escape the attacker, identified by local police as 36-year-old Min Yongjun, before adults enter equipped with straw brooms, chasing out Min.

No guards are visible close to the school’s gate.

No-one was killed but 22 children were injured in the attack at a school in the central Chinese province of Henan on Friday, the same day that 20 children were shot dead at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut in the US.

Despite the severity and scale of the US attack Chinese social media users complained that the Henan incident should have been given more coverage in the country.

“The headlines are still dominated by the American attack, I haven’t seen reports about the attack in Henan which happened on the same day,” wrote one user of Sina Weibo — a website similar to Twitter.

“Aren’t Chinese children’s lives also important? It’s a tragedy.”

According to instructions obtained by the China Digital Times website the government’s central propaganda department told Chinese media to downplay the Henan attack.

It quoted officials as telling media not to put the news on the front page or lure readers to it, and not to produce reports or comment on it other than those provided by Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

Local authorities said that Min had been “influenced by rumours of the end of the world”, which some in China believe is due to occur on Friday, in line with supposed Mayan prophecies.

Six local officials including the school principal were removed from their positions, according to reports.

Published on Dec 20, 2012

Chenpeng, China – Friday 21 December 2012
Police in China have released footage of last week’s knife attack on a primary school — a frenzied assault that left 22 children injured that was carried out by a man described by police as influenced by “rumours that the world would end”.

The grainy surveillance camera footage was taken from just inside the grounds of the school in the central Chinese province of Henan where the attacker, Min Yongjun, 36, struck last Friday.

6 local officials have been fired after the incident, but new CCTV footage suggests that many staff at the school acted heroically, running after the attacker and perhaps preventing more violence.

His attack was carried out the same day that a gunman in the United States killed 26 children and teachers at a primary school in Newtown

“Horror as school knife attack revealed on CCTV ”
“Moment crazed Doomsday knifeman Min Yongjun who stabbed 23 children attacks schoolgirl with machete”

On the same day, tragedies descended upon both a Chinese and an American elementary schools. Chinese news media, like their American counterparts, blanketed their front pages and prime-time news programs with coverage of the Connecticut shooting on December 16, while playing down or even clamming up in the face of the stabbings in China’s Henan province. Such drastically different attitudes that the Chinese press adopted toward the two school rampages have prompted Chinese netizens to express their utter disappointment with and madness at their country’s fourth estate. “Sadness: Chinese media only cry for American kids…”, they opined on the Internet.
Front pages of major Chinese metropolitan newspapers on December 16. “America is heart-broken”, “America is crying”…Many headlines read.

On the morning of December 14, Min Yingjun, 36, broke into a 84-year-old man’s home and slashed him with a knife found at in the old man’s kitchen before he burst into an elementary school nearby and used the same knife to stab 22 children. He was finally subdued by school teachers, villagers and policemen arriving on the scene. The old man and seven children were seriously injured and put under intensive care. Other children were hospitalized. Most children were left behind by parents who are migrant workers in other cities and cared for by grandparents. The scene was so bloody and so horrific that many grandparents fainted.
Almost all Chinese mainstream media, including state broadcaster China Central Television, South Metropolis Daily, Beijing Youth and major metropolitan papers in the country, gave extensive coverage to the shooting in the United States while grudging words on the mass stabbing in Henan. Xinyang Daily, a newspaper circulating in the city of Xinyang, which administers Guangshan County, where the mass stabbing took place, even kept singing praises of the local government while remaining silent on the subject on the next day. “Guangshan Strives to Provide Education that Satisfies the People” was the headline of a story on its front page published on December 17.
“CCTV of China school knife attack”