Classroom intruder shot dead by police
Print Edition
A MAN who threatened to blow up a classroom with 50 children and their teacher inside was shot dead by police in central China’s Hubei Province yesterday after he began pouring gasoline over a local official who had offered himself as a hostage.
No one else was hurt in the incident.
Zhang Zeqing, 57, is believed to have been carrying explosives when he entered the No. 3 Primary School in Qianjiang City’s Haokou Town shortly after 9am.
The provincial news portal (www.cnhubei.com) said he went to a classroom on the second floor where sixth-graders were having a lesson.
The website said he was in conflict with a village official over land distribution and compensation and the village official’s grandson was one of the pupils held hostage, it said.
Zhang was holding a lighter and threatening to detonate the explosives, it said, but the woman teacher, Qin Kaimei, persuaded him to let the children go.
When police and government officials arrived at the scene to negotiate, the town’s deputy Party chief Wang Linhua offered to take the teacher’s place, Xinhua news agency reported. After two hours of negotiations, Zhang began to pour gasoline on Wang, and police shot Zhang.
Zhang, who lived in Haokou Town, was an ex-serviceman who had been jailed twice for theft and making guns illegally. He was released last year.
China has seen several attacks against children in recent years, including a spate of incidents in 2010 that left 17 people dead — 15 of them children — and wounded more than 80.
In March last year a man killed two relatives and then injured 11 people, including six children, with a knife outside a school in Shanghai.
Yesterday’s incident comes on the heels of Sunday’s bombing of a fast-food restaurant in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
Two police officers were injured in the attack carried out by an unemployed man in a blackmail attempt.
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