Hundreds of Police Comb Shaanxi Hills for Knife Suspect Who Called 110 Himself Before Attacking
A manhunt involving hundreds of police, drones and dogs is under way in Shangnan County, Shaanxi, for 41-year-old Sun Haijun, whose knife attack left three dead and two injured — including an officer responding to a call Sun himself had made. He fled on foot into low forested hills after his car broke down in a collision with a patrol vehicle.
The detail that has fixed the country's attention is small and chilling: the emergency call came from the suspect. On November 4, in Shangnan County in southeastern Shaanxi, Sun Haijun, 41, called police to report a prostitution complaint, and officers who responded were attacked — the incident ended with three people dead and two injured, among them a police officer. Baidu's news board has been carrying the case under that very headline — the suspect reported it himself, then attacked police — as one of its top entries, a sign the story has broken well past Weibo.
What followed was a manhunt on a scale rural Shaanxi rarely mobilizes. Sun fled in a car, collided with a police vehicle, and abandoned the wreck near Qingshan Town before setting off on foot into the hills, carrying a knife. Local authorities have confirmed he remains at large. Several hundred police and township staff are now sweeping the area with drones, police dogs and checkpoint guards on every road out.
The terrain matters to how the search goes, and Chinese readers have been reading it as closely as the police blotter. One widely-shared post mapped the search zone along the southern foot of the Qinling range, noting that the hills there are low — mostly under 1,000 metres — and that broadleaf forests have just shed their leaves, which cuts down on cover. The same analysis comes with a warning: this is not deep wilderness, and the surrounding population density is high enough that a fugitive on foot is a risk to residents, not just to searchers. The county's police bureau has published Sun's description — short hair, medium build, and at the time he fled a blue suit jacket, jeans and black leather shoes — and marked him as a risk of reoffending, urging anyone who spots him to call 110 rather than approach.
The police-appeal posts have been shared widely as public service rather than spectacle, with commenters amplifying the hotline number and the instruction not to engage. That reflex is its own context: China's violent-crime rates are low by international standards, and cases like this one — a knife attack with multiple deaths in a county town — land as rare and alarming events, with the manhunt followed almost in real time.
By Wednesday morning, officials had confirmed that the three victims' bodies had been moved to a funeral home, and that the motive remains under investigation. The search continues in the hills around Qingshan Town; the case's open questions — why Sun called police to a scene he would turn into a crime, and what prompted the attack — are the ones the manhunt has not yet answered.