Police outside a subway station in Seongnam, South Korea, responded to an emergency incident on Thursday evening local time in which a man drove his car into a pedestrian walkway, then got out and began stabbing bystanders, multiple reports detailed.

Seongnam is a city outside of Seoul and part of the greater Seoul metropolitan area. The attack, local reports confirmed, occurred in a shopping mall near a subway station around 5:55 p.m., as urban workers were making their way home.

The Korea JoongAng Daily reported that 12 of the suspect’s victims have been hospitalized and police have reported no deaths and no critical injuries. Police identified the suspect as a 23-year-old man.

“The police said the attacker works in the delivery service and has shown symptoms of paranoid delusions,” the newspaper detailed.

The Korea Herald confirmed similar details, adding that police identified the man by the last name “Choi.” Initial reports, based on videos taken from the scene of the crime and shared on social media, suggested that Choi was accompanied by other men, but law enforcement authorities said they had no reason to believe that more than one person was responsible for the attack.

Many of the images surfacing on Twitter and other social media outlets have been deleted. Images collected by international news broadcasts show a man in a black coat walking around the shopping mall with a knife and abruptly stabbing random people. The South Korean Yonhap News Agency reported that his knife was “around 50 to 60 centimeters long” (20-24 inches).

South Korea has long enjoyed one of the world’s lowest crime rates. As of the latest statistics published in May – accounting for criminal activity in 2021 – the nation documented its lowest crime rate in at least ten years.

“Asia’s No. 4 economy reported 1,774 cases of criminal violations per 100,000 people in 2021, down 12 percent from a year earlier, according to the data compiled by Statistics Korea,” the Korea Herald reported. “The number of murders reached 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2021, down 18 percent on-year. The figures for acts of violence and theft fell 16 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, to 231 and 322 per 100,000, the data also showed.”

The country has nonetheless been experiencing a growing number of bizarre violent incidents, including a fatal stabbing rampage less than a week ago in Seoul.

Authorities identified 33-year-old Jo Seon as the assailant in an attack in which a man similarly targeted a subway station in southern Seoul and began stabbing people, apparently at random. One of his victims died of his wounds; he injured three others. Jo reportedly confessed to the crime and claimed he did it out of bitterness over his own life.

 “The man shouted he didn’t want to live any more as he was being apprehended by the police,” local media reported. Like Choi, the attacker in Thursday’s crime, Jo reportedly worked as a delivery driver on occasion, though he reportedly had no stable job.

In yet another strange incident, in June, a woman identified as 23-year-old Jung Yoo-jung killed and dismembered a woman she met online. Police identified Jung as a “loner and a recluse” who became obsessed with true crime documentaries and killed her victim “out of curiosity.”

South Korea has also experienced an increase in the number of documented infanticides, a crime apparently related to the nation’s birth rate collapse – it has the lowest birth rates on earth – and a culture hostile to children. In a harrowing case in June, police reportedly found two newborns in a woman’s freezer, “their bodies apparently frozen for years,” according to Time. The mother later confessed to killing the children when they were born in 2018 and 2019.

“The recent concerns around infanticide in South Korea coincide with ongoing anxiety over the country’s demographic trends. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, and the elderly are expected to make up a fifth of the population by 2025, putting further strain on its shrinking workforce amid growing demand for social services,” Time documented.
South Korea’s birth rate dropped below one – meaning women on average were expected to have fewer than one child in their lifetimes – for the first time in 2019. “Replacement fertility,” the rate a nation needs to ensure that its population will remain stable, is 2.1. The latest statistics, for 2021, show that the nation’s fertility rate is at 0.81.

“It was the lowest since the statistics agency began compiling related data in 1970. Last year also marked the fourth straight year that the number was below 1,” Yonhap News Agency observed last year.

The lack of children has resulted in pediatricians leaving the country or choosing other disciplines, making it difficult for the few people who choose to have children to find doctors for them. Other difficulties for parents include the increasing prevalence of “no-kid zones,” businesses that simply refuse to allow entry to children. These businesses often include coffee shops, restaurants, libraries, and other basic public areas.

The “no-kid zones” have triggered their own backlash. A cafe in the country went viral in May for posting a sign declaring itself a “no-senior zones,” claiming that older men liked to frequent the business to harass young women and they were thus banning seniors, prompting national outrage.

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