One person was killed and three more wounded when a man yesterday went on a “stabbing rampage” near a subway station in the South Korean capital, police said.
The attack took place near the Sillim subway station in southwest Seoul, police said, adding that the suspect had been detained by officers at the scene.
“The suspect is a man in his 30s and he did not look intoxicated. We are questioning him as to the motive of his crime,” they said.
Photo: AFP
Yonhap news agency reported that the attack happened near Exit 4 of the station at 2:07pm.
Video posted on local television station YTN’s YouTube channel showed orange-vested emergency responders running toward the incident carrying stretchers.
Police had cordoned off the area with yellow tape, it showed.
“The man shouted he didn’t want to live any more as he was being apprehended by the police,” YTN reported.
Grainy footage on YTN appeared to show police apprehending the suspect, who had sat down on steps and seemed to sit passively, as armed police approached him and placed him under arrest.
“People ran into my store, telling me a man with a big knife was stabbing people. We locked the door,” a store owner in the area told YTN.
Eyewitnesses said the suspect stabbed a man who was talking on the phone in the back multiple times before running off and attacking more people, Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported.
“All four victims are reportedly men,” it added.
South Korea is typically an extremely safe country, with a murder rate of just 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2021, official data showed.
By comparison, the US has 7.8 homicide deaths per 100,000 people, figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed.
Most South Koreans are trained shooters, as all men must perform about two years of mandatory military service.
However, the country has strict gun control laws and it is extremely difficult for civilians to obtain firearms, with gun-related crime almost unheard of.
There have been a handful of high-profile stabbing crimes over the past few years.
Earlier this year in the southern city of Busan, a 23-year-old crime drama fanatic stabbed to death a woman she had met online, local media reported.
In March, a 37-year-old woman was accused of injuring three people with a knife on a subway, allegedly after someone called her “ajumma” — a way to refer to a middle-aged woman.
Last year, a man stabbed a former co-worker to death in a subway station after stalking her for years.
He was later sentenced to decades in prison.
The rare incident in Seoul quickly began circulating on Korean-language social media.
“Don’t come to Sillim now. There is a crazy man on a stabbing rampage. I called the police after seeing a person injured on the ground,” one user with the handle sanong_cos wrote on Twitter.
US PUBLICATION: The results indicated a change in attitude after a 2023 survey showed 55 percent supported full-scale war to achieve unification, the report said More than half of Chinese were against the use of force to unify with Taiwan under any circumstances, a survey conducted by the Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center and Emory University found. The survey results, which were released on Wednesday in a report titled “Sovereignty, Security, & US-China Relations: Chinese Public Opinion,” showed that 55.1 percent of respondents agreed or somewhat agreed that “the Taiwan problem should not be resolved using force under any circumstances,” while 24.5 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” disagreed with the statement. The results indicated a change in attitude after a survey published in “Assessing Public Support for (Non)Peaceful Unification
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
RSS