Man accused in China school stabbings said life was ‘meaningless’ after job, girlfriend woes

Life ‘meaningless’ for China school attack suspect

BEIJING — The suspect in a Chinese elementary school stabbing that left eight children dead and five wounded said he felt life was meaningless after romantic failures and a fruitless job search, reports said Wednesday.

Former medical worker Zheng Minsheng is accused in Tuesday morning’s knife attack in the Fujian province city of Nanping — one of China’s most shocking crimes in years.

Zheng, 41, carried out the minute-long rampage as dozens of students and their parents stood outside the gates of the Nanping Experimental Elementary School waiting for it to open,

The dead included four boys and four girls, ages 6 to 11, while four of the wounded were in intensive care at a hospital after being stabbed in the chest, local media in Fujian province reported.

The suspect told investigators his girlfriend did not want to marry him and that he felt his peers looked down on him, according to a news release on the Nanping city government Web site. He also could not find a job and felt life was “meaningless.”

Reports identified Zheng as a doctor, although his official government-issued identity card said he only had a technical school education.

Gym teacher Gan Guiping rushed to the school gate when he heard screaming, grabbing a mop for protection.

“This man was holding a knife dripping with blood and he was muttering, ‘They don’t want me to live, they want to drive me crazy. Others are going to die with me,’” Gan told the Beijing News.

A teacher at the school who lives across the street said it started suddenly and silently and at first people didn’t realize why students were falling to the ground.

“Whenever he saw a child he would grab him by the shoulder and stab him. Or he would hold the child by the neck and stab downward,” the teacher, identified only by her surname, Li, was quoting as saying by the Beijing Daily newspaper.

Passers-by and school security guards eventually subdued the attacker. Blood from the 13 children was smeared from the sidewalk to the floor of a school reception room.

“The older ones were able to run away, but the younger kids were so scared that they couldn’t move,” an unnamed provincial public security official was quoted as saying in the Beijing News.

Officials were investigating Zheng’s mental state at the time of the attack, said a man surnamed Yu in the press office of the Nanping city Communist Party committee.

Zheng left his job at a community health clinic in June and had not been able to find work since, according to the city government.

Neighbors described him as handsome and tidy. They said he lived in a small apartment with his 80-year-old mother and his older brother and his family.

It wasn’t clear why he targeted the Nanping Experimental Elementary School, which is similar to a magnet school in the U.S. and attracted the city’s top students.

Most of the school’s 2,000 students returned to class Wednesday, where 56 counselors were on hand to provide emotional support.

China has witnessed a series of school attacks in recent years, mostly blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness.

Such attacks are particularly shocking because most urban families have only one child following government population control policies.

The story of the Nanping tragedy received wide attention in Chinese media, with newspapers running color photos of sobbing parents and relatives burning “spirit money” outside the school as an offering to their dead children.

Associated Press researchers Zhao Liang and Yu Bing contributed to this report in Beijing.