CHINA: Deadly knife attacks on school children in China are turning into a recurring nightmare for parents after yet another assault prompted a bout of soul-searching in the world's most populous nation.
Just before midnight on Thursday a man with a knife broke into a high school dormitory and murdered eight students in the fourth such violent knife attack since August.
Losing a child is every parent's deepest horror, but one that is felt keenly in a country where the one-child policy operates.
The unknown assailant broke into the dormitory at the No. 2 High School in Ruzhou just before midnight on Thursday. The official government news agency, Xinhua, said he then "chopped eight people to death and four to injury".
The earlier assaults in various parts of the country left one child dead and 42 people injured.
In the absence of a plausible explanation for the attacks, theories abound. One theory is explained by "the mentality of modern Chinese people. All the crimes stem from economic inequality," says Mr Jiang Tian (32). He and many others say schools don't give importance to student security.
President Hu Jintao issued a nationwide order in September for schools to hire guards and tighten security and while there are signs that schools in the capital have posted security, no one knows if there was any extra security in Ruzhou, a city of 920,000 people around 450 miles southwest of Beijing in Henan Province.
And then, of course, there is the awful possibility that no amount of security will stop the attacks.
The wave of violence began back in August, when a man with a history of schizophrenia killed a student and slashed 14 children and three teachers at a Beijing kindergarten near the compound where China's leaders live and work. He was working as a security man in the kindergarten at the time.
There is a lot of support for the death penalty in these kinds of cases among the public.
On Wednesday, a court executed a man who slashed 25 children with a kitchen knife in September at a grade school in eastern China. Though no one was killed, the court ruled that the penalty was justified because the violence was "especially cruel". Police said in that particular case that the attacker had a grudge against the parent of a student at the school.
In September, a man armed with a knife, petrol and home-made explosives broke into a day-care centre in the eastern city of Suzhou, near Shanghai, and slashed 28 children before police stopped him.
Police haven't given a motive in that case.