At least eight people have been injured in a stabbing incident in a supermarket in South Korea’s Incheon on Tuesday morning.
One of the injured was in a life-threatening condition, police and fire officials said, after the attack at about 1.40pm local time (4.40am GMT) at a large shopping complex in the Guwol-dong area of Incheon, a city west of the capital, Seoul.
Incheon’s fire department said a woman in her 20s underwent surgery at a nearby hospital after arriving in cardiac arrest. It gave no details on the severity of the other injuries.
The knife rampage occurred in a commercial building in Incheon where Homeplus supermarket is located, the Chosun Daily reported. The victims were six women and two men, officials said.
Police at Namdong district police station detained a 59-year-old man after business owners and bystanders subdued him as he attacked shoppers while moving through the complex, according to police and witnesses.
Witnesses told South Korean media that the man appeared to have knives tied to both hands, and a witness told Yonhap news agency that he began stabbing people at a discount store on the basement level of the complex.
Nah Hyun-joon, who helped subdue the man with several other people using chairs, told OBS television that he saw him attack about four people in the second-floor food court before moving up to the third floor, where he stabbed at least one woman.
Mr Nah said the man then headed towards a multiplex cinema on the fourth floor but was blocked by several people holding chairs at the top of the escalator, and that he and others trapped him from below and pushed him down with chairs near the escalator’s third-floor entrance before removing his knives.
“He just went around stabbing people,” Mr Nah told OBS. “He didn’t even say anything. He just stabbed whoever he saw.”
The man has a history of violent offences and mental illness and was required to wear an electronic monitoring anklet, the Justice Ministry said. He was sentenced to four years in prison for attempted murder in 2015, Yonhap reported.
He was placed under electronic monitoring in 2019 and had committed no repeat offences while under supervision, the ministry said, His name has not been released, keeping with South Korean practice for most criminal suspects.
Police booked him last month on suspicion of carrying a weapon after he used a kitchen knife to puncture a protest sign outside a hospital where he had a dispute, the ministry said. It added that he was receiving treatment for alcohol dependence and unspecified mental illnesses.
On the day of the attack he attended a counselling session from 10am to 11am and met his probation officer from 11.20am to 11.55am, the ministry said, and the officer confirmed that he had taken his medication and had lunch with him until 12:30pm, while authorities detected no attempts to destroy his monitoring device.
“We sincerely apologise over the great public concern caused by the knife attack by an individual under electronic monitoring,” the ministry said in a statement. It said it would review the supervision of the suspect and its electronic monitoring procedures more broadly.
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