The man who stabbed three people to death in Taipei appeared to have prepared meticulously for his attack, police investigators said on Saturday, even as they struggled to find a motive forhis spree of violence.
Two days before the man began his assault with smoke grenades and a long knife in the city’s main subway station on Friday afternoon, he checked into a cheap hotel just 50 yards from the store where he ended his spree, Taiwanese police officers said.
He had left evidence of his plans in digital form, they said, and on foot and bicycle he scouted the locations where he attacked stunned shoppers and commuters.
And during his hourslong assault he changed his outfit five times, the police said, although they did not make clear exactly where or when.
“Up to now we have not been able to clarify his motive. We know only that he had a plan for this attack,” Lu Chun-hung, the chief of the criminal investigation division of the Taipei City Police, told reporters. He also sought to douse rumors that the attacker, whom the police identified as Chang Wen, had acted in league with others who remained at large.
“We’ve reviewed all the surveillance camera footage and found that he acted alone and did not have any contact with anyone else,” Mr. Lu said.
Three people died from wounds suffered in the attacks, and the attacker died after apparently jumping from the fifth floor of a retail building where he had just fatally stabbed a man. Another 11 people were injured, six of whom were still in the hospital on Saturday, said Taiwan’s Minister of Health, Shih Chung-liang.
The bloodshed drew intense public attention in Taiwan, where outbursts of deadly violence are rare.
For the second day in a row, Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te and other senior officials, sought to reassure residents that the government would thoroughly investigate the killings and look for lessons to prevent any similar attacks. The last similar case was in 2014, when a man went on a stabbing spree on a Taipei subway train, killing four people. He was executed in 2016.
The latest series of attacks began at about 3:40 p.m. and ended a little over three hours later, according to a timeline described by Chang Jung-Hsin, the director-general of Taiwan’s National Police Agency, in a televised meeting. At the same meeting, Taiwan’s premier, Cho Jung-tai, suggested that answers were needed about why the attacker could continue his actions for so long after witnesses were already alarmed.
The police said the man set out from his hotel room and began by trying to set on fire parked vehicles. He went back to a small apartment he rented and tried to set fire to it, and then went to Taipei Main Station, pulling a small trolley holding improvised smoke grenades. He tossed the grenades near a busy concourse and entryways and attacked a man with a knife, after the man tried to stop his attack, the mayor of Taipei, Chiang Wan-an, told reporters.
Police officers arrived to try to catch the attacker, but he escaped back to his hotel room, and then walked about half a mile to a branch of the Eslite bookstore in Zhongshan neighborhood, an area thronged by young Taiwanese, especially on a weekend evening. He had rented a hotel room a stone’s throw from the store.
He threw more smoke grenades at the crowd, which was growing increasingly alarmed. The attacker, dressed at this point in black shorts, shirt and cap, then stabbed a second man. Then he rushed upstairs in the bookstore and fatally stabbed another man on the fourth floor.
Moments later, the attacker climbed to the fifth floor of the building, left some clothes and equipment on the floor, and plunged to his death on the street below.
While officials stressed that are still trying to understand the attacker’s motives, details of his life and final actions suggest that he led an isolated and increasingly troubled life.
He had fallen out of contact with his family for two years or more, and had also lost his job, the police said. Previously, he had been discharged from the Taiwanese military in 2021 for driving while drunk. Family members told the police investigators that he had been interested in weapons since childhood.
When he fled the train station, he left behind gasoline bottles, a tactical vest and a gas mask. At his small apartment, which he had tried to set on fire, investigators found more knives, five gasoline containers and a laptop computer that was burned. Inside the hotel room that the man had rented for his final three days, they found 23 primitive gasoline bombs, two tablet computers and more knives.
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.
The post Taiwan’s Subway Stabber Planned His Deadly Spree, Police Say appeared first on New York Times.
