05.04.2023
At least four children died this Wednesday and three were injured in an attack on a day care center in the city of Blumenau, in southern Brazil, according to the Fire Department.
A 25-year-old man entered the Cantinho Bom Pastor nursery, in the Brazilian city of Blumenau, this Wednesday (04.05.2023), with an axe, attacked the minors and then turned himself in to the authorities, according to the Military Police, quoted by local media.
It is attack in the state of Santa Catarina it occurs ten days following another that took place in a school in Sao Paulo, where a 13-year-old teenager stabbed a teacher to death and injured four other people.
The new aggression took place around 09:00 local time (12:00 GMT). Several units of the fire brigade and the Police have gone to the scene to deal with the emergency.
“Four deceased minors were confirmed and three were taken to the hospital,” said the Fire Department, which reported that “other public security bodies” are also acting in the area to investigate the episode.
Forensic team in front of the nursery that was the target of an attack in Blumenau, Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil.
“An individual entered the school with a knife and killed four children. There were also four injuries,” a source from the state government told AFP.
The perpetrator of the attack, a 25-year-old man, “turned himself in” at a Military Police headquarters, where “he was arrested,” the force reported in a statement.
The attacker “jumped over the wall with a bladed weapon, like an axe. He hit the children, especially in the region of the head,” Diogo de Souza Clarindo, from the Fire Department, told local press.
He killed a girl and three boys between the ages of 5 and 7, added the firefighter in front of the Cantinho Bom Pastor private preschool in Blumenau, a city of 360,000 inhabitants.
The injured are two 5-year-old girls, and two boys aged 3 and 5, reported sources from the Santo Antonio de Blumenau Hospital. According to Souza Clarindo, one of the little ones is in a “serious” state.
The authorities reported that at the time of the attack there were regarding 40 children in the establishment.
Repeated attacks once morest educational establishments
In recent months, similar attacks have been repeated in other educational centers in Brazil, a country that until recently was not used to these violent acts.
In addition to the attack ten days ago, on November 25, a 16-year-old teenager shot dead four people in two successive attacks on two nearby schools in Aracruz, in the southeastern state of Espírito Santo.
Two months earlier, a man armed with a revolver and two knives invaded a civic-military school and killed a disabled student in the northeastern state of Bahia.
Likewise, on March 13, 2019, two former students entered a school in the city of Suzano, some 60 kilometers from Sao Paulo, killing five students and two workers, and leaving a dozen injured, before both of them left. they will take life
Lula describes the murder of four children in a nursery as “monstrosity”
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, described as “monstrosity” the murder of four children this Wednesday in a nursery in the city of Blumenau, in the south of the country, committed with a knife by a man who has been arrested.
“There is no greater pain than that of a family that loses its children or grandchildren, even more so in an act of violence once morest innocent and defenseless children,” the president wrote on his social networks.
According to Lula, “for any human being who has a Christian sentiment, a tragedy like this is unacceptable” and an “absurd act of hatred and cowardice.”
CP (efe, afp)
