A driver hits and stabs a crowd in a mall in Seoul
At least 14 people have been injured, two of them in critical condition, after a man rammed a vehicle and stabbed a crowd Thursday night at a shopping mall in the Bundang district of southern Seoul. South Korea.
The authorities have reported this Friday that the two victims who are in critical condition could suffer brain death, while most of the injured have a serious prognosis.. Of the total, nine have stab wounds and five from the hit-and-run.
The attacker, identified by his last name Choi, 20 years old, has rammed a vehicle around a shopping center, where he attacked the customers of a store. The Police have arrested him five minutes after the complaint, as reported by the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has instructed all police forces to deal “severely” with the knife attack “so people won't be uneasy,” according to presidential spokesman Kim Eun Hye. .
“The stabbing at the Seohyeon subway station is an act of terrorism against innocent citizens,” Yoon said, further ordering precautionary measures as a series of threats to commit copycat crimes have been posted online.
“Mass stabbing” threats
An hour after the stabbing, several threatening texts circulated on social networks, one of them in which an individual threatened “mass stabbings” at Ori station, also south of Seoul, with the aim of “killing as many as possible of people possible”.
In a second text, another individual shared a photo of a weapon and threatened to kill 20 people at the Seohyeon station today, according to the South Korean agency Yonhap, and the authorities indicated that two other texts would have been received a few hours later with threats. Similar.
Police launched an investigation to hunt down the perpetrators of these threats and intensified online surveillance, while squads were dispatched to the Ori and Seohyeon subway stations, as well as two other subway stations in the area, to They were prepared to respond to any emergency situation.