Car driven into crowd outside primary school in China

A car has been driven into a crowd of people outside a primary school in China’s Hunan province, with multiple injuries feared.

There are no details of casualties yet but state media said “several students and adults were injured and fell to the ground”.

Several people have been sent to hospital.

The driver of the vehicle – identified as a white SUV – was caught by parents and school security officers and handed over to police.

Mr Zhu, a parent of one of the children at the school, told the BBC that he had dropped his eight-year-old at the school and was leaving when he heard a disturbance outside the school premises.

“Six or seven parents had forced the car of the person who hit others to stop. Even the security guard was knocked down. The guard is quite old, in his seventies or eighties, and couldn’t do much,” he said.

“About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously, but luckily the ambulance came very quickly.”

Video from the scene posted on a private WeChat account showed some children lying on the ground, while panicked students carrying school bags flee the scene.

The school has been identified as the Yong’an Primary School in Dingcheng District in China’s southern Hunan province.

Another video filmed soon after the incident showed an angry pedestrian hitting the SUV with a snow shovel while the driver is still inside.

The driver gets out of the other side of the vehicle and is then seized by bystanders who start beating him with sticks.

The driver is now in police custody.

This is the third seemingly random attack on crowds in China in a week.

At least 35 people were killed in a car attack in southern China on 12 November, and eight people were killed in a stabbing at a school in eastern China over the weekend.

On social media, there have been discussions about the social phenomenon of “taking revenge on society“, where individuals act on personal grievances by attacking strangers.