Beijing [China], January 25 : A Chinese man who wounded a Japanese woman and her child and killed a bus attendant trying to protect them in a knife attack in June last year, has been sentenced to death, CNN reported, citing a Japanese official.
A court at Suzhou in China ruled that the 52-year-old unemployed man, surnamed Zhou, stabbed the trio after he became indebted and lost interest in living, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Thursday.
Details of the ruling were not immediately available through Chinese official announcements or local news reports, but Hayashi said Japan's Consul General to Shanghai attended the sentencing.
"The (Japanese) government considers the killing and wounding of three people, including a completely innocent child, to be unforgivable, and we take the verdict with the utmost seriousness," CNN quoted Hayashi as saying.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stopped short of confirming the sentencing, saying only that "Chinese judicial authorities will handle (the case) in accordance with the law" at a daily press conference on Thursday.
The stabbing attack was the first of two on Japanese nationals last year that raised concerns about anti-Japanese sentiment in China and prompted Tokyo to demand Beijing ensure the safety of its citizens, as reported by CNN.
Notably, knife attacks are not uncommon in China, where guns are tightly controlled. The attacks relating to the Japanese also occurred amid a surge of sudden episodes of violence targeting random members of the public in China, including at or near hospitals and schools.
This particular attack took place on June 24 when the Japanese mother was picking up her child at a bus stop near a Japanese school, Japanese officials previously said.
The mother and child suffered non-life-threatening injuries during the attack. But a Chinese bus attendant who tried to stop the attacker later died of her wounds, as per CNN.
On Thursday, Hayashi repeated calls for the Chinese government to protect Japanese nationals in China. The Suzhou court ruling stopped short of making any reference to Japan, he noted.
According to CNN, nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment have been on the rise in China, often fanned by state media and manifested in discussions on China's strictly censored social media platforms.
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