A 50-year-old man attacked Friday afternoon in front of a supermarket in downtown Beijing was a family member of an Israeli diplomat based in China, local police said in a statement.
Beijing police detained the suspect, described as a 53-year-old man who holds a foreign passport and works in the city, the police said in a statement. There was no information about the citizenship of the suspect.
Earlier, an Israeli embassy spokesperson told Bloomberg News that an employee of the embassy suffered injuries in an what appeared to be a knife attack carried out on the street during daylight hours. The person was said to be in a stable condition in the hospital, the spokesperson said.
Police confirmed that an investigation is ongoing, police said, giving no reason for the attack.
In a statement issued late on Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry expressed sympathy for the injured man, adding that China attaches great importance to the safety of staffers of foreign embassies.
Ambulance ‘Coming Soon’
A video circulating on X, the social media site once known as Twitter, shows a man dressed in white wrestling on a sidewalk with a middle-aged man. The man in white then stabs the other person several times.
The clip, apparently filmed by someone in a building overlooking the street, later shows the victim moving to safety and the attacker fleeing. A separate video filmed from street level shows people helping the bloodied victim.
A voice can be heard saying in Chinese: “I’m from the Israeli embassy.”
“An ambulance will be coming soon,” another voice says in English.
The person who posted the videos on X didn’t respond to messages Friday evening.
There’s no indication that the episode is linked to the ongoing war in Israel and Gaza. Israel has been targeting the Gaza Strip with air strikes, killing some 1,500 people, after attacks by Hamas militants killed 1,300 Israelis last weekend. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union.
Hu Xijin, a former editor of the Chinese state-backed Global Times newspaper, said on the social media site Weibo that the attacker must be punished according to the law regardless of his purpose. The articles were unavailable later Friday.
Bloomberg
