Alwaght- Death toll from a knife attack at a school in China's Shaanxi province has climbed to nine, local authorities said on social media.
The state-run Xinhua news agency, initially reported that seven students were killed and 12 injured in a knife attack at a middle school on Friday evening. Hours later, the Mizhi county government said on Weibo that two students had died of their wounds in hospital, Sputnik reported.
The 28-year-old suspect was detained. A police source told Beijing-based news site Jiemian.com that the assailant had dropped out of the school previously and wanted to "take revenge against the school and society".
Knife attacks at schools in China are common. Last year, a man climbed over the wall of a kindergarten and attacked 11 students. None suffered life-threatening injuries.
In 2016, a man in the southern province of Hainan stabbed 10 children before killing himself, authorities said.
And another man killed three students at a school in 2014 before jumping off a building.
But perhaps the worst spate of stabbings occurred in 2010, which included a period of three consecutive days in which attackers targeted schools. China's Ministry of Education responded to those events by ordering schools to beef up security and bar strangers from going on campuses.
