At least 35 people died and dozens more, no less than 43, were injured when a vehicle hit a crowd at high speed in Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong. A massacre, one of the worst of its kind in China, the reasons for which remain to be clarified. Zhuhai police said the car hit a large group of people training outside the Xiangzhou district sports center, a traditional venue for its athletics track and soccer field, and that it was difficult to understand in the initial stages of the investigation whether the accident was the result of a deliberate action. The fact is that the man driving, a 62-year-old identified only by the surname Fan, pushed his “small SUV through the gate and made his way into the city’s sports centerramming people who were training on internal roads,” state media reported, hitting them as if they were bowling pins to be knocked down. The officers later found him while he was inflicting cuts with a knife and “immediately stopped him and took him to hospital for treatment: he is in a coma after having self-inflicted wounds to his neck and other parts of his body and is unable to to be interrogated”, explained the police, in increasingly serious updates provided late in the evening.
In the meantime, President Xi Jinping intervened on the incident, assuring that local authorities had been mobilized to protect and save the affected residentsand urged maximum efforts in relief planning. He also called for severe punishment of the perpetrator “in accordance with the law.” The story, however, had other dark aspects, as it was censored by the Great Firewall: having occurred on Monday evening, this morning footage and comments on Mandarin social media had been largely deleted and blacked out. However, media shared by dissident blogger Li Ying showed injured people lying on the ground and firefighters busy providing aid.
Only in the afternoon did the state media begin more widespread coverage and provide a bulletin of deaths and injuriesexplaining that Guangdong province and Zhuhai city had “quickly dispatched hundreds of rescue workers to provide emergency care to the injured,” including eight teams of more than 30 experts to coordinate the efforts. The National Health Commission has mobilized officials from the medical emergency response unit to support the aid. The episode is the latest in a brutal series that is shaking public opinion on security matters. In October, a man killed three people and injured 15 at a supermarket in Shanghai. The Japanese embassy in China has reminded its fellow citizens to remain alert, to “refrain from speaking loudly” and “to avoid provocative behavior that attracts attention”, posting an announcement similar to the one released after the death of the student 10-year-old Japanese boy stabbed near his Japanese school in Shenzhen.