Chinese ‘left-behind’ girl’s limbs chopped off, grandfather killed in brutal knife attack
A four-year-old girl is being treated in hospital after a man allegedly chopped off her limbs and killed her grandfather in a brutal attack in southern China’s impoverished Guizhou province.
The attack in the Qixingguan district of Bijie last month, which is believed to be linked to a property dispute, left the child’s left hand and right foot completely severed and she has had to undergo multiple operations on her left leg, the news website Thepaper.cn reported.
The girl is now fighting an infection in a hospital in the provincial capital of Guiyang.
Her doctors said she had suffered multiple knife wounds in the attack, which killed her 58-year-old grandfather.
The suspect had been apprehended, Bijie public security officials said. His motive was believed to be related to a property dispute, the report said.
“My daughter’s left leg will have to undergo at least seven or eight further surgeries in order to save it. The whole process could take up to a year,” the girl’s father, Zhang Ya, was quoted as saying in the report.
He said he worked in the city of Zunyi, also in Guizhou, and had left his daughter in the care of his father in Bijie after his divorce from his wife.
Zhang said his neighbour, the suspect in the case, had had disputes over housing issues with his father in the past and had lost a legal battle against them.
According to the report, the neighbour ambushed the elderly man on a mountain and attacked him with a knife. The grandfather died at the scene while the girl suffered multiple knife wounds including severed limbs.
”My daughter is now trying to fight off an infection and is still living in fear,” Zhang said.
Guizhou, and especially the city of Bijie, has made headlines over the state of its vulnerable “left behind” children and violent attacks against them in recent years.
Many rural children in China are left with their grandparents, or by themselves, when their parents head to the cities for better jobs, especially in poor provinces such as Guizhou.
These parents leave children behind because of the high cost of living in cities and strict household registrations, which often prevent them from receiving social benefits such as medical insurance and education.
There are 61 million so called “left behind” children in China’s countryside – more than a third younger than 17 – who are living without day-to-day care from their parents, according to government statistics.
