Chinese Man Detained for June Knife Attack against Japanese Indicted in China; Motive, other Details Remain Unexplained

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:27 JST, December 27, 2024

A Chinese man detained for the murder in June of a Chinese woman and attempted murder of a Japanese mother and her child in Suzhou, China, was indited by Chinese authorities by Thursday, according to multiple sources in Japan and China.

The knife attack occurred on June 24. A Japanese mother and her child waiting for a school bus were injured after being attacked by the knife-wielding man, and the Chinese woman, Hu Youping, was killed by the man as she tried to stop the attack. She was 54.

According to the sources, the man was from outside Suzhou, had no job and bore a grudge against society. However, Chinese authorities have not yet revealed the offender’s actual motivation for the attack or the background of the case.

In September, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death in Shenzhen, China. Following the case, Keiichi Iwamoto, the director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Consular Affairs Bureau, visited China in October and held talks with the vice foreign minister of China. According to Iwamoto, the Chinese side told him that the judiciary proceedings would go forward under the Chinese system for both cases, which would be thoroughly investigated to discover the truth, and explanations would be given to the Japanese side.