One dead in apparent shooting in rare case of gun violence in China

The sun sets behind the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and the Tortoise Mountain TV Tower in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on April 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil, File)

BEIJING — One person has died in an apparent shooting at an outdoor restaurant in the city of Wuhan in what would be a rare case of gun violence in China.

A police statement said Monday that two other people were injured on Sunday night in what it called a case of “deliberate injury” resulting from a dispute.

Social media posts described what happened as a shooting and shared images of a person slumped in a chair and another person lying on the ground. The statement from the Qiaokou District police branch in Wuhan didn’t say what weapon had been used.

China has strict gun control laws, and reports of gun violence are extremely rare. While some may be covered up by government censorship of negative news, knife attacks appear to be more common, as well as driving a vehicle into a crowd.

China’s state-run media plays up reports of gun violence in the U.S. in what is seen as part of a campaign to convince the population that the nation’s one-party, communist-led system is better than America’s democracy.

The attack on Sunday occurred in an area with a cluster of restaurants with outdoor seating serving barbecued meat on skewers.

A video of the aftermath, which has been taken down from social media, shows a crowd of people milling around the well-lit, nighttime scene, before emergency medical workers arrive and bring out a stretcher to take the victims away.

In 2010, a man firing a small automatic weapon burst into a court office in central China and killed three judges before taking his own life. He reportedly held a grudge against the court over a ruling in a property dispute between him and his wife, who were getting divorced.

Wuhan is an industrial city on the Yangtze River in central China. The Chinese government locked down the city in early 2020 in the first major outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.