Police officers investigate and protect the crime scene outside a railway station after an attack in Kunming, in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, Saturday March 1, 2014. China’s official Xinhua News Agency says authorities consider the attack by a group of knife-wielding assailants at a train station in southwestern China in which at least 27 people died to be an act of terrorism.BEIJING – More than 10 knife-wielding attackers slashed people at a train station in southwestern China late Saturday in what authorities called a terrorist attack, and police fatally shot five of the assailants, leaving 28 people dead and 113 injured, state media said.
The attackers, most of them dressed in black, stormed the Kunming Train Station in Yunnan Province and started attacking people in the late evening, witness Yang Haifei, told the official Xinhua News Agency in an interview from a hospital where he was being treated for chest and back wounds.
“I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he told Xinhua, adding that people who were slower ended up severely injured. “They just fell on the ground,” Yang said.
Xinhua did not identify who might have been responsible for the attack, but said authorities considered it to be “an organized, premeditated violent terrorist attack.”
In an indication of how seriously authorities viewed the attack — one of China’s deadliest in recent years — the country’s top police official, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu, was on route to Kunming, the Communist Party-run People’s Daily reported.