Three people were killed and 15 injured on Monday night when a 37-year-old man with the surname “Lin” went on a knife rampage at a Walmart supermarket in Shanghai.
Chinese police have released few details about the suspect or his motivations, including whether the attack was deliberately timed to coincide with China’s National Day holiday or not. The Chinese Communist Party celebrates the establishment of communist China by mass murderer Mao Zedong on October 1.
Police said the attacker traveled from his undisclosed hometown to Shanghai to “vent his anger due to a personal economic dispute.” They did not say if this dispute had anything to do with Walmart.
The man named Lin produced a knife and began stabbing customers at the Walmart at around 9:45 p.m. on Monday night. He was arrested shortly after the attack.
Lin managed to stab 18 people, three of whom died in the hospital from their injuries. The other 15 are reportedly recovering from wounds that were not “life-threatening.”
“There was blood everywhere,” an eyewitness told the BBC on Tuesday. “I didn’t know what was happening, but suddenly, I saw people running in a panic. No one had ever experienced something like this, and we weren’t mentally prepared for it.”
China has suffered a string of knife attacks over the past few months, including one against a ten-year-old Japanese student who was stabbed to death near his school in Shenzhen in September. That attack unleashed a tidal wave of anger on both Chinese and Japanese social media.
Perhaps mindful of the social media firestorm from the previous attack, or worried that the Chinese Communist Party will be embarrassed by its inability to protect citizens from knife attacks, Chinese censors went into overdrive on Monday night deleting social media posts about the Shanghai stabbing.
Videos of the attack and its bloody aftermath, recorded by smartphones and security cameras, went viral in China before the government began pulling them down. Some of these videos showed at least one child among the bloodied victims.
Tuesday was the official beginning of China’s week-long “National Day” holiday, commemorating 75 years of authoritarian rule by the Chinese Communist Party.