A teenage student stabbed at least four people, injuring three of them seriously, in a knife attack at a South Korean high school today, police said.
The attack happened around 8:36 am at a school in Cheongju, 110 kilometres (70 miles) south of Seoul, according to police reports.
Police received a report that “a student had stabbed someone in a classroom with a knife”, the Chungbuk Provincial Police Agency said in a statement.
The three people who were seriously injured included the school’s headmaster, who suffered a stab wound to the abdomen, reports AFP.
A government employee was also stabbed in the chest and the school’s janitor was stabbed in the back, according to police.
Police said three other people also suffered minor injuries. One of those three, who gave his surname as Im, told Yonhap news agency that the student stabbed him in the face and ran away.
He said he was driving slowly “when the student came up and knocked on the door”.
“I opened the window and he stabbed my face without saying anything before running away, I’m, 43,” he said.
The student tried to flee to a nearby lakeside park, where he jumped into the lake, but was apprehended 12 minutes after the initial report, according to Cheongju police.
The 18-year-old was taken to hospital with minor injuries.
“We are trying to determine the details and motive,” a local police official told our correspondent.
Police later confirmed they confiscated four different weapons, including a box cutter, from the student.
“In this case, the student had the items in their bag from the time they arrived at school, so it seems that others (the teachers) were not aware of it,” a high school official told a media briefing.
Yoon Geon-young, superintendent of education for Chungbuk province, told reporters that the “incident was unpredictable and should never have happened”.
“Fortunately, the students remained safe and were neither direct witnesses to the situation nor traumatised by it,” Yoon said.
The case comes months after a teacher fatally stabbed an eight-year-old student at an elementary school in South Korea.
However, South Korea is generally a very safe country, with a murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2021, according to official statistics, well below the global average of six per 100,000.
