Beijing Gunman Kills 8, Wounds 30 During Festival

BEIJING — As dozens of foreign diplomats and business people watched from nearby high-rise apartment buildings, a lone man armed with an automatic assault rifle sprayed bullets into rush-hour traffic Tuesday, killing at least eight people and wounding at least 30 before being killed himself in a hail of police gunfire, officials said.

Because the shooting occurred on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the annual Chinese harvest celebration, many people said they confused the sound of gunfire with fireworks. As a result, hundreds of bicyclists and motorists continued to drive blithely into the line of fire during the 20-minute incident.

“There was no panic, no panic at all on the streets,” said Carlos Fernandez, a journalist with a Spanish news agency who watched the shooting from the balcony of his 13th-floor apartment. “People kept coming directly toward the man with the gun.”

Among the dead in the incident, the latest in a recent wave of violent episodes across China, was an Iranian diplomat and one of his four children riding with him in their family car on their way to school.

The shootings took place just outside Jianguomenwai Waijiao Gongyu, the Chinese capital’s largest diplomatic compound, and adjacent to other high-rises restricted to foreign occupants. Police officials said the diplomat, Yousef Mahammadi Pishknari, was apparently not a specific target in the “indiscriminate” killing.

Yang Zhaohui, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security, identified the gunman only as an “armed hoodlum.” Witnesses described him as a young Chinese wearing a dark jacket and carrying what appeared to be an AK-47 assault rifle.

“I looked out the window and there was this guy, walking in the middle lane of the highway occasionally shooting off 3- and 4-shot bursts from his automatic rifle,” said one Western diplomat who witnessed the killings from his apartment window.

Witnesses said that during the incident, which occurred in the crisp morning sunshine on one of Beijing’s busiest roads, the gunman shot into a crowded bus, killed a child riding a bicycle next to his father and shot a passenger in a taxi van. Victims, including an elderly bus passenger with the back of her head shot off, were scattered on both sides of the road.

Reuters news agency, quoting unnamed sources, said the gunman was a disgruntled junior officer in the People’s Armed Police who began the killing spree by hijacking a Jeep and demanding that the driver take him to Tian An Men Square in the center of Beijing.

The man was diverted from his destination when the driver crashed the vehicle into a tree and fled on foot. It was then that the gunman began walking down the northbound center lane of the six-lane Second Ring Road, one of the major arteries that encircle the capital.

At one point, said the Western diplomat, who used binoculars to follow the trail of carnage, the man knelt in the center of the highway and loaded another cartridge into his weapon. At various points, the diplomat said, passers-by oblivious or indifferent to the danger attempted to talk with the man as he moved along the road.

The killings came at a time when Chinese officials have become increasingly concerned about the sale of weapons to Chinese civilians. In certain areas outside the capital, including Baiyangdian in Hebei province, weapons such as the AK-47 assault rifle are available for sale to customers with cash.

In March, 24 Taiwanese tourists and eight Chinese were killed by armed robbers on a cruise boat on a lake in Zhejiang province.