The New York Times reports on a rare incident of brutal violence in Shandong:
Two men wielding a shotgun and a homemade pistol fatally shot three police officers and an assistant and staged a series of carjackings in a city in northeastern China, state news media reported Wednesday, a rare example of gun violence in a nation where average citizens are largely barred from owning firearms.
The episode in Tai’an, a city in Shandong Province, left five others wounded after officers and assistants of the city public security bureau visited a home to question a murder suspect.
The official Xinhua news agency reported that the officers and the assistant were killed at the home, shot by two men inside who fired through an accordion gate that covered the doorway. The four, from a neighborhood precinct station, were unarmed; officers in the public security bureau, as the Chinese police are called, sometimes do not carry weapons.