Cancer patient arrested for fatal stabbing of doctor in China

Posted On:   23 October 2019

China – 23rd October, 2019: Police arrested a man after a doctor was stabbed to death while on duty at a hospital in northwestern China.

The 54-year-old suspect, surnamed Yang, was caught on Tuesday after he allegedly attacked the 42-year-old, surnamed Feng, at Gansu Provincial People’s Hospital in Lanzhou, police said.

The suspect, who has cancer, had surgery at the hospital three years ago, when Feng was the doctor in charge, they said. Investigators said they had not established a motive for the stabbing and that their inquiries were continuing.

Feng was in a consulting room at the time, a source claiming to be her colleague told medical website Dxy.cn.

She suffered more than 20 wounds, seven of which were fatal, the colleague said. The attacker took an unidentified liquid to splash around the room, which the source said smelled like sulphuric acid.

Since 2001, at least 36 Chinese doctors and medical staff had been killed in hospitals, Dxy.cn reported. Some attackers were patients, while others killed doctors in anger over high hospital fees.

Fatalities in the last three years include the stabbing in August last year of a 47-year-old doctor by three men at a military hospital in Tianjin.

In October 2016, a 36-year-old paediatrician in Laiwu, Shandong province, died after being stabbed 27 times by a relative of a sick child.

“China’s medical environment is pathetic,” an orthopaedic specialist from Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province wrote on social media app WeChat.

“We have to spend more than 10 years studying and training before qualifying to be a clinical doctor. But, in the end, our pay is so little. What’s more, in this way of serving people, we might lose our life by a knife.”

Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3034264/chinese-man-arrested-stabbing-doctor-who-was-charge-his-cancer