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Six nurses and a co-worker at a Chinese hospital have been knifed to death by another member of staff at a female employees’ dormitory, state media said.

The man who carried out yesterday’s attack in the resort town of Beidaihe in the northern province of Hebei told police he had “a history of mental illness”, state news agency Xinhua said.

The suspect was named as Li Xiaolong by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), adding he was about 27 and had been detained by police.

The attack was carried out early yesterday “in the women’s staff dormitory at the 281 Hospital in Beidaihe”, it said in an online post, and another nurse had been wounded.

Chinese hospitals have seen a series of violent attacks, but they are more often carried out by angry patients against medical staff.

In April, a 45-year-old man unhappy with his circumcision stabbed a doctor to death in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Three months earlier a man was sentenced to death for killing an ear, nose and throat specialist in neighbouring Zhejiang.

Meanwhile, a Chinese “quack” doctor who was released recently from prison after serving a term for a string of patients’ deaths, has been jailed again over another fatal malpractice case.

Hu Wanlin, who theorises that water causes all diseases, dehydrated a young man to death after providing him with his treatment, a court found, sentencing him to 15 years in prison for illegally practising medicine, the Global Times newspaper reported yesterday. The official news agency Xinhua said that a court in Henan, central China, found that Yun Xunyang, a 22-year-old college student devotee of traditional Chinese medicine, died after taking a substance provided by Hu.

Hu, who had been blamed for at least 16 patients’ deaths and claimed to be “omnipotent”, believed that his patients needed to be dehydrated with a “magic medicine” using powerful salts, the paper added.

Hu found Xunyang’s autopsy result hard to swallow, the Global Times said, claiming that he frequently consumes 1.5 kilogrammes of the salt and liquid mixture without ill-effects. – AFP