Kindergarten Teacher Arrested For Allegedly Poisoning 23 Children

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A kindergarten teacher was arrested in eastern China after 23 students became ill in an alleged act of poisoning, police said Tuesday. The teacher, identified by the last name Wang, is believed to have contaminated the children's food with sodium nitrite, Jiaozuo City Police said on their official blog.

Overexposure to sodium nitrite, a white powder most commonly used in fertilizers, can be toxic and even fatal to humans. Police said they were still looking for a motive in last week's incident.

Children in China have been the targets of attacks, often fatal.

In October last year, an assailant with a knife injured 14 children in a kindergarten in the city of Chongqing, in western China. The attacker, a 39-year-old woman, was taken into custody, but the motive for the assault was unclear.

In April, a 28-year-old former student, allegedly seeking revenge for being bullied, stabbed nine students at a high school in northwest China. Another 10 people were hospitalized with injuries resulting from the uproar in the rural area.

China strongly restricts private gun ownership, making knives and homemade explosives the most common weapons in violent crime, but last week's incident in Jiaozuo was not the first suspected case of poisoning.

In 2002, 42 people, mostly schoolchildren, died after eating snacks with rat poison in the eastern city of Nanjing. The murderer, who was apparently jealous of his rivals' thriving business, was quickly sentenced to death and executed.