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Fourteen people were injured on Thursday in a stabbing and car rampage in Seongnam, a city southeast of Seoul, officials said, in the second mass stabbing in the greater Seoul area within a month.
Five of the victims on Thursday were struck by a car that was driven onto a sidewalk near a subway station. Nine others were then stabbed inside the station, according to a spokesman for the fire department of Gyeonggi, the province surrounding Seoul.
The suspect, a 23-year-old male delivery worker whom the authorities only identified by his surname, Choi, was arrested on charges of attempted murder, according to Park Jeong-won, head of the criminal affairs division at the police station in Bundang, the district in Seongnam where the attack took place.
Officials said that they were still investigating the motive, but believed mental illness had played a role.
The suspect, who had no criminal history, dropped out of high school and had received psychiatric treatment until 2020, the police station for southern Gyeonggi said in a statement.
The attacker drove his mother’s car to the train station, and used two knives that he had bought at a nearby store the day before the stabbing, the police added.
All of the victims, except one who sustained mild injuries after being struck by the vehicle, were taken to nearby hospitals with severe wounds, and two remained in critical condition on Friday, the fire department spokesman said.
Five of those hospitalized were men and eight were women, and about half of the victims were in their 20s, he added.
The episode took place at Seohyeon Station, one of the busiest subway stations in the center of Seongnam, a middle-class city of about one million. The station, with a large department store and a popular bookstore, is a favorite gathering spot for residents and students.
Mass acts of violence, like stabbings and car rampages, are rare in South Korea. The attack Thursday shocked the nation less than a month after another stabbing at a subway station in Seoul left one person dead, three others injured and the public questioning its sense of safety.
The Seoul police have identified the suspect in that attack as Cho Sun, 33, and have charged him with murder and attempted murder.
The country was put further on edge as murder threats were shared on social media, saying that there would be more stabbings soon at other subway stations around Seoul, specifying when and where. The police said on Friday that they were investigating those threats, which they suspected were related to the attack Thursday.
Whatever turns out to have motivated that attack, the authorities said that they were viewing it as an act of terror.
“The Seohyeon Station rampage is a terrorist attack on innocent citizens,” President Yoon Suk Yeol told Lee Sang-min, the interior minister, the presidential office said on Friday.
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