

A shocking news story shook Taiwan today. This morning a 4-year-old girl was beheaded in broad daylight, in front of her mother and grandfather, by a 33-year-old man.



The man, surnamed Wang, had been wandering around Xihu Metro Station in Taipei after buying a cleaver from a shop in the morning. While he was walking, he saw a little girl whose mini scooter had gotten stuck in a pothole on the road, Apple Daily reports.

He approached her and madly stabbed her several times with the cleaver to the point of breaking her neck, and severing her head. The girl’s mother and grandfather tried to stop the assault, but, unfortunately were unsuccessful.

“When it happened, I was just 1 meter away from her,” the girl’s mother told reporters. “I saw the man come up to my daughter and thought he was helping her, but when I approached them I saw the man hacking at my daughter’s neck. The first thing I did was grab hold of the man, but I wasn’t able to stop him, all I could do was hold him and stop him from escaping, while calling for help.”

Wang was arrested after the murder and was found to previously have been diagnosed with a mental illness, as well as having drug convictions.



The shocking news has again aroused debate among Taiwanese netizens on Facebook about whether the government should abolish the death penalty.

The CEO of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty has expressed her condolence on her Facebook earlier today: “(I feel) Very very very sorry. How on earth could we stop this kind of incident from happening again? I really hope there’s a simple answer for it.”

However, some netizens online believe that the only way to stop random attacks like these from happenings is to continue executing the murderers. “Does this kind of man still have human rights? Still have the right to life? Picking on a defenseless little girl? What a coward! He should go straight to hell!” wrote a Taipei netizen.

“No matter whether it is is simple or not, people must pay for their mistakes. It’s meaningless to keep this kind of man alive any longer!” another angry netizen wrote.

However, in a TV interview, the girl’s mother also mentioned that she doesn’t think that any kind of regulation will be able to stop random murders from occurring. Instead, she hopes that these tragedies could be eliminated through better family and school education:



And here’s a video of the suspect in the middle of a media scrum:

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By Liting Lin

[Images from Chinatimes]