Not long after midnight on January 1, a single gunshot pierced the tranquil New Year’s night in downtown Shenzhen, ending, Southern Metropolis Daily (SMD) writes, a hostage situation after more than an hour of negotiations.
In the early hours of January 2, the deceased, Kuang, a Shanghai native in his 30s, rushed into a restaurant on Jintang Jie in Luohu district with a butcher knife in hand, taking one waiter hostage.
Kuang forced his hostage, 40-something Wei, to walk along for several blocks before eventually being confronted by police in Wanxiang Square, near the intersection of Bao’an South Road and Jiangbing Road. The standoff continued until 2 a.m., when an officer fired a single shot, hitting Kuang in the face and freeing Wei.
According to SMD, police have yet to determine the man’s motive, but a number of eyewitnesses have said that Kuang appeared unstable.
When an SMD reporter arrived at the scene just after 1 a.m., the streets had been blockaded and a large crowd had formed. The reporter writes of seeing Kuang, slightly overweight and wearing a dark jacket and glasses, holding his knife to his hostage’s throat, below the jaw. The man’s hands simply hung down and he showed no facial expression or signs of resisting.
When police tried to approach or hand him cigarettes, Kuang would move his knife from Wei’s throat and raise it in the air, warning police to step back.
Uniformed and plainclothes police continued to arrive, and one nearby resident said that by 1:30 a.m., 11 police cars and one ambulance had been brought to the scene. The crowd grew and traffic slowed to a halt.
After Kuang was shot at 2:08 a.m., dozens of police swarmed the two men, whisking the hostage into the ambulance, where it was determined he had not been harmed. Kuang died at around 5 a.m. as a result of being shot in the face.
Following up, SMD learned that Kuang was not a coworker nor did he seem to be an acquaintance of Wei’s. Police said that no friends or family of Kuang’s have yet been in contact, and his motive remains under investigation.
In a similar hostage situation in Guangzhou in 2010, after less than an hour of negotiation the culprit was shot four times at close range by a plainclothes policewoman who approached the man pretending to be offering some water. His hostage, a young woman, was stabbed by her captor after police arrived and had become covered in blood.
