Blumenau, the city famous for hosting the Brazilian version of the German Oktoberfest, has been shaken this Wednesday by a brutal massacre in a nursery.
A man, whose identity and motives remain unknown, has stormed a kindergarten armed with an axe, killing four children between the ages of five and seven and slightly injuring a fifth.
This one in Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, is the most recent, but fatal attacks of this nature are becoming more frequent.
The previous one was nine days ago, a student stabbed a teacher to death in a school in São Paulo.
The 25-year-old murderer carried out the attack early in the morning and later turned himself in to the Military Police, as explained by the general police commissioner of Santa Catarina, the southern Brazilian state where Blumenau is located.
Commissioner Ulisses Gabriel, quoted by G1, from the Globo group, declared: "The computer crime repression police station, which has experience in extracting data from telephones and computers, wants to investigate if there are accomplices, if someone else participated, how he drew up the plan and where he got the information from.”
Before the agents who have arrested him, the attacker has remained silent.
Witnesses to the massacre have told the local press that he jumped over the school wall and randomly chased, ax in hand, some of the children present.
The victims are three boys and a girl who were between 5 and 7 years old.
The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, condemned the massacre;
he tweeted that it is an "act of hate and cowardice."
The governor of Santa Catarina, Jorginho Mello, has decreed three days of mourning.
For any human being who has a Christian feeling, a tragedy like this is unacceptable, a behavior, an absurd act of hatred and cowardice like this.
— Lula (@LulaOficial) April 5, 2023
Brazil has recently suffered a wave of attacks on schools, often perpetrated by students or former students and in some cases with firearms.
On Monday, March 27, a 13-year-old student armed with a knife killed a teacher and injured two classmates and two teachers before two other teachers managed to neutralize him.
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