Photo

A man with a knife slashed at least six people during a brazen late morning assault outside a railroad station in Guangzhou, China, on Tuesday, officials said. It was the third such attack by assailants at a railroad station since March.

The Guangzhou police said on the force’s official microblog account that a single person was responsible for the knife attack and that he had been shot and wounded by the police. Initial reports from the state media had said there were as many as four assailants.

Xinhua, the main state-run news agency, said the man was undergoing surgery in a hospital but did not say whether he had been arrested. “The suspect was not carrying his relevant documents, and the police have so far been unable to establish his identity,” said Xinhua.



Among the six people injured, one was stabbed in the head and neck and was in critical condition, The Guangzhou Daily reported.

The violence in southern China’s largest city is likely to further unnerve a nation struggling to cope with increasingly frequent attacks on civilians in high-profile public areas, including a daring assault last October at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing that left five dead. The authorities have tied that attack to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that advocates independence for the western region of Xinjiang.

On Tuesday, Meng Jianzhu, the Communist Party’s chief official for domestic law and order, ordered police and law officials to start a campaign “dedicated to fighting terrorist violence,” Xinhua reported.

“Use a heavy hand, strike with a heavy fist, and beat down the arrogance of violent terrorists, ensuring that people live and work in peace,” Mr. Meng said.



Video

The latest attack came just a week after assailants with explosives and knives staged an assault that left three people dead — two believed to be the attackers — and injured at least 79 outside a station in Urumqi, in Xinjiang.

That burst of violence occurred just after China’s president, Xi Jinping, had ended a visit to the restive area. After the assault, he said China must prepare itself for a long-term fight against what he called separatist forces in Xinjiang, where members of the Uighur minority feel increasingly alienated from wider Chinese society and where Han Chinese increasingly dominate.

On March 1, a group of ethnic Uighurs slashed and killed 29 people at a railway station in Kunming, in Yunnan Province in southwestern China. An English-language editorial by Xinhua drew connections between last week’s blast and the attack in March.

The Guangzhou Daily quoted a store owner at the scene who recalled that the man had been squatting near his store for about two hours , using clothes to cover his luggage. He suddenly gave out a loud cry, drew a knife from his luggage and started hacking passengers and baggage porters before the police started shooting.

Photos posted online by Chinese news outlets showed blood spilled in a plaza. In one image, paramedics treated an injured person while a police officer patrolled, holding a long staff with a semicircle at the end. Security personnel in China have recently been given instruction on how to help subdue attackers with knives.

While the Chinese government has suggested that the recent violence is directed or inspired by groups outside the country, Uighur leaders, including Rebiya Kadeer, a critic of the Chinese Communist Party who lives in Washington, lay the blame on what she called repressive policies by Beijing.

“To someone who knows the region from the inside and has seen the policies the Uighur people have to face, the real perpetrator would be obvious,” she said in an interview Friday with Radio Free Asia. “A researcher would put the blame squarely on the Chinese government’s policies directed at Uighurs. This is exactly why China does not allow international media to investigate the event on the ground — if only they could, the truth would be clear.”

During a visit to Hong Kong on Tuesday, Daniel R. Russel, the United States assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, strongly denounced the train station attack.

“My reaction to the knife attack in Guangzhou is one of horror, outrage and sympathy,” he said during a previously scheduled briefing for a small group of local and foreign journalists. “We are appalled at the action and categorically condemn the attack against innocent civilians — while I don’t yet know many of the details regarding this particular incident, I think I speak for all Americans in expressing heartfelt sympathy to the victims.”

But Mr. Russel followed the previous American pattern, which has irritated Chinese officials, of waiting for additional information instead of immediately labeling assaults like Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.

“We oppose terrorism in all forms, and in those instances where the available information or the information shared by the Chinese authorities pointed to terrorism by a group or individual, we have condemned it as terrorism,” he said.

Austin Ramzy and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting, and Patrick Zuo contributed research.