Three dead and 15 injured in supermarket stabbing

Three people died and 15 others were injured after a man committed a stabbing at a Walmart supermarket in Shanghai on Monday evening.

Chinese police said they arrested a 37-year-old man surnamed Lin at the scene, adding that he had come to Shanghai to “vent his anger over a personal economic dispute.” Further investigations are ongoing.

The incident occurred at a shopping mall in Songjiang, a densely populated district in the southwest of the city that is also home to several universities.

According to police, the three deceased succumbed to their injuries in hospital. The others “did not suffer life-threatening injuries” and are not in danger.

“There was blood everywhere,” an eyewitness named Shi told BBC News.

Mr. Shi, who runs a jewelry store on the ground floor of Ludu International Commercial Plaza, said dozens of firefighters and officers from the Special Weapons and Tactics Unit (SWAT) entered the mall and urged people to evacuate.

“I didn’t know what was going on, but suddenly I saw people running away in panic,” he said.

“No one had ever experienced anything like this and we were not mentally prepared for it… A random incident of this nature is frightening and disturbing,” he said, adding that he had “narrowly escaped death.”

Discussions about the incident now appear to have been censored on Chinese social media.

The supermarket was open for business on Tuesday, but with additional safety measures in place.

Firearms are banned in China, but the country has seen a spate of knife attacks in recent months.

Last month, A 10-year-old Japanese student died a day after he was stabbed near his school in southern China.

In June of this year there were four US university professors stabbed to death in a public park in the northeastern city of Jilin. A man in May stabbed two people and injured 21 others in a hospital in the southern province of Yunnan.