S Korea Stabbing Spree: Police Detain Suspects in 2nd Incident

By Staff, Agencies

South Korean police have detained a man suspected of stabbing a high school teacher with a knife in the city of Daejeon.

Friday's stabbing follows a separate, apparently random attack on Thursday in which 14 people were wounded near a busy subway station in Seongnam.

Officials at the Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency didn’t immediately release the personal details of the suspect in the attack on the teacher at Songchon High School, describing him only as a man in his late 20s.

According to police, the suspect waited for the teacher to step out of a classroom before stabbing him and fleeing the scene, which, according to officials, suggests they were acquaintances.

Police and fire department authorities did not specify the teacher’s health condition.

During Thursday’s attack in Seongnam, at least five people were hurt by the car and nine others were stabbed in a crowded leisure district near a subway, according to Yoon Sung-hyun, an official from the southern Gyeonggi provincial police department.

Authorities arrested a 22-year-old suspect at the scene and were questioning him. Police did not identify the man or offer any immediate information about a potential motive.

According to Park Gyeong-won, an official at Gyeonggi’s Bundang district police station, the suspect during police interviews talked incoherently and said he was being stalked by an unspecified source.

The suspect’s family told police he had a history of mental illness.

The attack was South Korea's second mass stabbing attack in a month. Last month, a knife-wielding man stabbed at least four pedestrians on a street in the capital, Seoul, killing one person.

In response to the attacks, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has called for closer monitoring of social media to detect threats, deploying more law enforcement officers for prevention and equipping them with better suppression gear, according to Seoul’s presidential office.

South Korea’s Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper published a video on its website that it said was sent by a witness on Thursday. The footage showed a man wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie walking up the mall’s escalator with an object in his hand.

A witness named Hwang Hee-woon told YTN television that he “heard a sound from the first floor that seemed like a scream, so customers and shop workers were gathering on the rails of the second-floor near the escalator to see what was happening below.”

“Suddenly, someone told us the person who committed the crime was coming up to the second floor, so we ran away in panic,” he said. He ended up hiding inside a refrigerated storage room with some mall employee

The National Police Agency held an online meeting on Thursday with regional police chiefs to discuss ways to deal with stabbings and other attacks against random targets.

Officials discussed increasing nighttime patrols in leisure districts and other crowded areas and strengthening security camera surveillance, according to the agency.