03 August 2023 , 10:38
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At least 13 people have been injured a man rammed a car onto a pavement and then began stabbing people near a shopping centre in South Korea.
Nine people have been stabbed and four others were injured when a car driven by the suspected attacker rammed up the pavement in Seongnam, just south of Seoul, Yoon Sung-hyun, an official from the Southern Gyeonggi provincial police department has confirmed. The Police Commissioner went on to call the incident "virtually an act of terrorism" as they questioned an unidentified suspect at the scene.
Photos from the scene showed forensic units examining the halls of the AK Plaza, where the stabbings took place. A white Kia hatchback with a broken front window and ruptured front tire was near the underground station. Pictures shared on social media that are too gruesome to publish show a young woman laying in a puddle of blood in the middle of a shopping centre. Two men can be seen helping her as she holds her abdomen where she appears to have been wounded. Further pictures taken from CCTV inside the mall show one knifeman running towards crowds of people.
A terrifying scene at the AK Plaza near Seohyeon Station in Bundang, GyeonggiBundang police received a call around 6 pm that a small vehicle had jumped the pavement and approached the shopping mall, hitting pedestrians. Around the same time, an emergency response team received a call that a man was attacking people. Not long after the attack, a video of the attacker carrying the knife walking causally heading toward an escalator circulated on Twitter.
"The attack [near the] Seohyeon station is really terrifying", one user wrote on X — the social media app formerly known as Twitter. They continued: "How can we feel safe and comfortable going outside with incidents like this happening?" South Korea is typically an extremely safe country, with a murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2021, according to official statistics. By comparison, the United States has 7.8 homicide deaths per 100,000 people, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The latest incident comes just two weeks after an unnamed man went on a stabbing rampage near southwest Seoul's subway station, leaving one person dead and three others wounded. Yonhap news agency reported that the frenzied attack unfolded near Exit 4 of the station and footage showed emergency responders rushing toward the scene, carrying stretchers to save passengers from the horror. The suspect shouted he "didn’t want to live any more" as he was being detained by the police.
"The suspect is a man in his 30s and he did not look intoxicated. We are questioning him as to the motive of his crime", police said at the time of the attack. Min Moon-ki, an official from Seoul’s Gwanak district police office, said the victim who died was male but didn’t share his personal details. An update on the condition of the other three who were injured is unknown.
Please check back regularly for updates on this developing story .