Several hospitalized as man drives SUV into crowd at Chinese elementary school

Nov. 19 (UPI) — Several people were hospitalized Tuesday after an SUV was driven at a crowd as parents were dropping off their children at an elementary school in the city of Changde in China’s southern Hunan Province.

A 39-year-old man surnamed Huang was detained after allegedly ramming his car into people deliberately, according to local police in the city of 5 million which is located 105 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Changsha.

The incident occurred just after 7:30 a.m. local time at Yong’an Primary School in the city’s Dingcheng district. The victims were sent to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police said the incident was under investigation.

The BBC reported that the alleged perpetrator who was driving a white SUV was surrounded by parents and school security and handed over to police.

“About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously, but luckily the ambulance came very quickly,” the BBC quoted the father of an 8-year-old pupil at the school as saying.

“Six or seven parents had forced the car of the person who hit others to stop. Even the security guard was knocked down.”

Footage circulating online showed children on the ground amid a scene of panic with students trying to escape, people attacking the SUV and the driver being beaten by incensed bystanders after exiting the vehicle.

It was the third mass attack, and second in which a vehicle was used as a deadly weapon, in a week after 35 people were killed and 43 injured when a man drove a vehicle into a crowd exercising at a sports center in Zhuhai, just across the Zhujiang Estuary from Hong Kong, on Nov. 12.

On Saturday, eight people were killed and 17 injured in a knifing rampage at a vocational college in Jiangsu Province, around 180 miles west of Shanghai, allegedly by a disgruntled student upset at being unable to graduate due to failing an exam.

So far this year, police have recorded 63 deaths and 166 injuries in 19 random violent attacks, classed as incidents targeting people not known to the perpetrator, a fourfold jump from 2023.