At almost exactly the same time – around midnight on Saturday evening 23 June – two heinous acts occurred. The one was a terrorist attack in Pakistan that killed 11 people, including two mountaineers from China; and the other was a murderous rampage with a shotgun in Shanghai that killed six people. Thus on this Monday there’s mayhem on the front pages of many of China’s newspapers (apart from a few that decided to sidestep the murder and terror entirely and go for something like the Gaokao results instead, e.g. Chongqing Economic Times). See below for galleries.
Terrorist attack
The featured image is today’s front page of the Daily Sunshine (晶报) from Shenzhen, which reports that two Chinese mountaineers were among 11 people killed by the Taliban in a terrorist attack late Saturday night at Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world in the Himalayas in Pakistan. The two men killed were renowned mountaineers Yang Chunfeng (杨春风) from Xinjiang, and Rao Jianfeng (饶剑锋) from Shenzhen. A third man in their party, Zhang Jingchuan (张京川), was able to escape. The attack was perpetrated by 10-12 men wearing police uniforms, who arrived in the middle of the night and stormed the mountain camp where the mountaineers were staying. They roused everyone from their sleep, stole their valuables, and then opened fire. Zhang Jingchuan ran for his life, hid in a ravine, and later made a satellite call to alert the authorities.
Here are three more front pages today that carried the Pakistan terror story:
Murderous rampage
The South East Express (东南快报) from Fujian province today explains that a 62-year-old man, the director of a chemical company in Baoshan (宝山) in Shanghai, went on a shooting rampage with a shotgun on Saturday evening because of a dispute with a contractor. It appears that things began to go wrong at a meeting that was taking place at the factory on Saturday evening. At some point a dispute went from being a war of words to a deadly fight in which the director beat the contractor to death. He then got hold of a shotgun and asked his driver to take him somewhere. On the road he killed the driver, before returning alone to the factory, where he killed a guard at the gate of a nearby military barracks and took his gun. He then killed another three people at the factory, before police arrived and were able to subdue him. In all he killed six people and injured four.
Here are three more front pages today that carried the Shanghai rampage story:
Links and sources
Daily Sunshine (晶报): 深圳登山家饶剑锋巴基斯坦遭袭遇难
South East Express (东南快报): 上海62岁持枪男子连杀六人