In an incident that reminds us of the Beijing hostage-taker that was taken out by a sniper last month, in Guangzhou Railway Station in Guangdong province on Saturday, a man holding a 10-year-old girl was likewise shot by police, and the hostage successfully saved (though not without injury; hearing it described, she got cut as the man was going down, creating a very dangerous situation).

According to China Daily:

Police opened fire when they found the hostage’s life was threatened by the suspect, a police officer from Guangzhou bureau of public security said.

“Police negotiators failed to reach an agreement with the suspect on the release of the hostage after hours of negotiation on the scene,” said the officer. But he refused to reveal details about the suspect and the hostage, saying “investigation is still ongoing”.

Here’s a popular video of cops moving into position:

This incident reminds us of another that happened in Guangzhou two years ago. In the video below, a hostage-taker is shot four times at point-blank range by a female plainclothes officer, and the hostage is saved. Of course all of it was filmed and shown on the news:

Yesterday night, a man took a subway security guard hostage for about 70 minutes at Tuanjiehu station on Line 10, and when negotiators failed to get him to release the hostage, a sniper took him out. A lot of the dialogue in this video is unintelligible, but we’re pretty sure that at the beginning, the hostage-taker tells everyone nearby, “Don’t come any closer.” Starting at the 19-second mark, he says: “I’ll wait half an hour, if I’m too tired to follow you guys (unintelligible)… then don’t blame me.” As he says this last part, he points the knife at his hostage, as if to say: don’t blame me for what happens to her. Just preceding that, one of the negotiators says (14-second mark) a “leader has already agreed (to your terms),” though what those terms are, we don’t know. At the 30-second mark, someone off-camera says, “No one move, no one move.” In the next scene, the man is down on his back — headshot, we’re guessing.

One of my Chinese friends says the man appears to speak with a northeastern accent. The latest news I could find regarding this incident was from a Beijing Evening News article published at 3:42 pm today. The weapon eventually used was apparently a QBU-88 (Type 88) sniper rifle. The man reportedly kept muttering to himself, and according to Beijing Evening News, “his body continuously swayed back and forth, don’t know if out of stress or other unknown reason,” with a gaze that kept drifting. We still don’t know what prompted him to take the woman hostage, or what demands, if any, he made. Youku video for those in China after the jump.

Beijing is not a city where you expect to hear about someone being shot dead, but that’s what happened last night when a man took a security guard hostage at knifepoint inside Subway Line 10′s Hujialou station. According to Beijing TV this morning, the incident began just after 9 pm (UPDATE: “around 8:30 pm,” according to the reporter in the above video). Police were called in and tried negotiating for 70 minutes. When that failed, a sniper took out the man, and the hostage was freed.

In the above, you can clearly see the hostage-taker, a man in a suit and glasses. You can watch police position themselves, and glimpse the sniper rifle eventually used to end the standoff.

The Beijinger has this story as well, with pictures from QQ, along with translations of netizen comments from Weibo. “The guy who got shot is the abandoned child of society,” says one. “Women should all work in offices,” says another. (The Internet for you, in a nutshell.) You can join the conversation here if you’d like (1,000-plus comments so far).

After the jump, there’s a video taken by a citizen journalist shortly after this incident happened. You can’t really see anything, but he does point out that a lot of cops were in the area.

UPDATE, 7/21, 8:43 pm: New video here; we still don’t know what the hostage-taker’s demands were though.

Via QQ

Via Weibo:

YouTube version of the above Sina video:

Citizen journalist films scene: