A 27-year-old man who allegedly wounded four passengers in a random knife attack at a Taipei metropolitan raliway station on Monday last week was yesterday charged with attempted murder.
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office indicted Kuo Yen-chun (郭彥君) after the district court on Tuesday last week agreed to prosecutors’ request to detain him on grounds that he might attempt to flee.
Kuo allegedly attacked passengers on an escalator in the Zhongshan MRT Station with a 20cm fruit knife just before 9pm, injuring four people, police said.
About 10 station security officers subdued the suspect within one minute of the attacks.
Kuo said that he would have “proceeded until everyone was dead” if he had not been stopped and apprehended by security guards and station staff, according to investigators.
As Kuo did not claim he heard voices telling him to kill, investigators said they did not conduct tests to determine his mental health.
All four people injured — three women and one man — were hospitalized with knife wounds that were not life-threatening, police said.
The suspect said he had been unemployed for a long time and was in a “bad mood” that day, according to investigators.
The slashing spree was the second such attack on Taipei’s MRT system in the past 14 months.
On May 21, last year, Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) killed four passengers and injured 24 when he went on a knife-wielding rampage on a moving MRT train.
The 21-year-old college student was convicted of multiple homicide and given four death sentences and a prison term of 144.5 years by the Taipei District Court earlier this year.
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