Children and adults are injured in China as a car plows into a crowd outside a primary school

Taipei, Taiwan – Dozens of children were injured by a car outside a primary school in central China’s Hunan province on Tuesday, reports said. A few hours after the incident, the number of dead was not clear and the authorities were not sure whether it was an accident or a deliberate attack. This incident follows a series of recent incidents of killing or attacking people in China by people riding in cars or carrying knives, including some in schools.

The students were coming to classes around 08:00 at Yong’an Elementary School in the city of Changde when a small white SUV plowed into the crowd of children and adults, according to the media. Few details have been released, reflecting China’s tendency to suppress stories about crime, protests and mass accidents that could erode public confidence in the ruling Communist Party’s ability to maintain public order.

A few elderly people were also injured, said the official of Xinhua News Agency, adding that the driver was subdued by his parents and security guards and the other injured were taken to the hospital.

The police in the city’s Dingcheng district, where the school is located, released a statement saying that no one was seriously injured and revealed that the driver is a 39-year-old man, Huang, who has been arrested. It said it was investigating the incident but did not release a name about the cause or other details.

Pictures posted on Chinese social media showed the injured lying on the street as terrified students ran past the gate and into the school building.

Commentary on Chinese Internet sites expressed anger and frustration at the ongoing violence against civilians by public activists.

Although China has much lower levels of violence than most countries – gun ownership is illegal – knives and the use of improvised explosive devices still occur.

Chinese schools have faced many attacks by people armed with knives or using cars as weapons. Getting stabbed an attack on a vocational school in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi on Saturday left eight people dead and 17 others injured.

That happened right after a certain man he drove his car into people at the sports field in the southern city of Zhuhai, leaving 35 people dead and 43 others injured.

In September, three people were killed in a knife attack at a Shanghai supermarket, and 15 were injured. Police said at the time the suspect had financial disputes and came to Shanghai “to vent his anger.”

That same month, a Japanese schoolboy died after being stabbed on his way to school in the southern city of Shenzhen.

The Chinese government generally censors online content it deems too sensitive or political, and some images of the school scene were quickly taken down. Many Western social networking sites and search engines such as Google are banned in China, limiting the content available even though some people use tools like VPNs and post news on Chinese social media before censors have time to catch it.