Chinese police have arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of stabbing eight teenagers to death as they slept in a school dormitory, the latest in a wave of school attacks in China, state media said on Saturday. Yan Yanming was arrested in dirt-poor Ruzhou, central Henan province, on Friday when his mother turned him in to police after he attempted suicide at home, media said.
Twelve students were stabbed, eight died and four were wounded, two of them critically, it said.
No motive was given for the murders, but the Beijing Youth Daily said Yan was hostile towards his victims, who were students at an expensive boarding school.
Many rural residents are too poor to send their children to senior high school or university because of increasingly expensive tuition and shrinking state subsidies.
It was the sixth attack on schoolchildren in just four months, prompting schools in Beijing and other cities to recruit security guards to protect students.
China executed on Wednesday a bus driver who stabbed 24 primary school children with a kitchen knife and kidnapped a nine-year-old girl at a primary school in eastern Shandong province in September.