ZHEJIANG — A car ploughed into a crowd outside a primary school in the eastern Chinese city of Jinhua on Tuesday, the South China Morning Post has learned, although the number of casualties is not known.
It is not clear whether the incident in Zhejiang province was a deliberate "lone wolf" attack like others in China in the past six months, or an accident.
Police and hospitals in the area would not give details of the incident when contacted by the Post but did not deny it had happened.
An employee of the Jinhua Municipal Public Security Bureau who answered the phone said he was "not aware" of the crash.
"For that matter, you can contact Sumeng police station," the worker said, referring to the police station near the site of the suspected crash, although he did not specify what the "matter" was.
The police station near the scene and the public security branch in Wucheng district, where the primary school is located, gave similar responses.
"I can only say that some patients are being treated here, but I cannot disclose any further information," an emergency department worker in a major Jinhua hospital said by phone.
A social media WeChat account run by citizen journalists reported on Wednesday that a fatal "car accident" had occurred in Jinhua, citing shop owners near the primary school who said that several students had been hit.
Videos posted online showed a car with a local licence plate apparently stopping in front of a school after hitting a crowd of people. In the footage, several bloodied adults and children appeared to be lying in the street and roadside flower beds were overturned. The footage also showed some parents who had arrived to pick their children up from school.
The Post has not independently verified the authenticity of the videos.
Jinhua is a city of more than 7 million people about 300 kilometres (186 miles) southwest of Shanghai.
Some residents said they had heard about a crash on Tuesday, although authorities have restricted the spread of the news, especially videos of the incident.
Chinese media have not reported on the crash, with their coverage of such incidents strictly censored. Journalists are not encouraged to go to the scene but to wait for official announcements.
The incident comes five months after 62-year-old Fan Weiqiu drove a sport utility vehicle (SUV) into a crowd outside a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 43.
On Nov 16, five days after the Zhuhai attack, eight people were killed in a knife attack at a university in the eastern province of Jiangsu. The attacker was a 21-year-old man named Xu Jiajin, who had previously studied at the university.
Fan and Xu were executed on the same day in January.
Other incidents last year included a stabbing outside a primary school in Beijing in October in which five people, including three children, were wounded. Also, that month, a 60-year-old man was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou for stabbing three people, including two students.
In September, China witnessed two more fatal knife attacks: one at a supermarket in Shanghai in which three people died, and another in the southern city of Shenzhen, resulting in the death of a Japanese boy.
In response to these incidents, Chinese authorities have stepped up security, urged officials to maintain social stability and called for grass-roots conflict resolution measures to protect citizens.