A knife-wielding man stabbed 12 students in a provincial high school, killing eight and injuring four, local police said on Friday.

Eight died instantly in dorm. Four injured students were rushed to hospital on Friday morning. 

The murders took place in the boy's dormitory of No 2 High School in Ruzhou, central China's Henan Province, several hundred kilometers south of Beijing.

The students were all fast asleep when the incident happened at a quarter to 12 on Thursday night.

The victims are all schoolboys aged 16 to 17.

As a boarding school, most of the students, if not all, live on campus in large dormitories with a resident teacher to take care of them. They generally travelled home once every two weeks.

On hearing the news, many horrified parents came from all parts of the city to the campus to visit their children, said a local source.

Classes were not held on Friday and the school has strengthened its security measures.

The murder suspect, identified as Yan Yanming, was seized at 4 pm Friday by local police in Ruzhou. Yan, 21-year old man with junior middle school education, failed to commit a suicide after killing the students. His mother reported to local police.

He broke into the high school with a knife in his hand at 23:45 Thursday and chopped eight students to death and four others to injury, according to the local police who got the urgent report at 2:00 AM Friday.

Police said the attacker ran from the school after the slayings and they received the first emergency call at around 2 AM Friday morning, more than two hours after the attacker broke into the school grounds and began the brutal attacks.

Authorities were also busy investigating the motive and identifying the victims.

China has suffered a series of knife attacks in schools and day-care centers in recent months.

The authorities have ordered schools nationwide to tighten security by hiring guards and upgrading surveillance devices.

Authorities on Wednesday executed a man convicted of kidnapping a child and wounding 24 children with a kitchen knife in September at an elementary school in east China's Shandong Province.

In August, 15 children, one of whom died from head wounds, were slashed by a janitor at a kindergarten in Beijing.

And in October, at another Beijing kindergarten, police reported that a man killed a teacher and a 5-year-old boy pupil.

(China Daily, Xinhua News Agency November 27, 2004)