BEIJING (AP) — A slashing attack Tuesday at a busy railway station in southern China left six people injured, police said, in the third high-profile assault on civilians at a train station in a little more than two months. 
 
 It was not immediately clear if there was more than one assailant, and there was no immediate word on a motive for the violence in the Guangdong provincial capital of Guangzhou. 
 
 The slashings came despite heightened security countrywide in the wake of two deadly attacks at train stations blamed on extremists from far-western China. The country also has seen mass stabbings carried out by people with grudges against society or who were deemed mentally ill. 
 
 The latest incident happened late morning at the Guangzhou Railway Station, the city's police said on their microblog. Police arrived on the scene as passengers were being hacked, and officers shot and subdued a male suspect with a knife after he failed to respond to a police warning, the statement said. 
 
 It wasn't clear from the statement whether there was more than one attacker. The Guangzhou Daily cited witnesses as saying there were four attackers. It said the injured included a person who was stabbed in the head and neck and was in critical condition, and others who had received arm wounds. 
 
 Police said six people were injured and taken to a hospital, not including the suspect. 
 
 Last week, a suicide bombing at a train station in the far-western region of Xinjiang — where extremists among the Turkic Uighur Muslim population have been waging a simmering insurgency against Beijing for years — left three people dead and 79 injured, prompting Chinese President Xi Jinping to demand "decisive actions" against terrorism. 
 
 In March, five knife-wielding men and women believed to be Uighurs slashed at crowds at a railway station in Kunming city in southwestern China, killing 29 people. Four attackers were killed by police. ||||| 1 of 2. Armed policemen stand guard at a railway station after a knife attack in Guangzhou, Guangdong province May 6, 2014. 
 
 BEIJING (Reuters) - An assailant stabbed six people on Tuesday at a railway station in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, police and state media said, the latest in a series of attacks that have unnerved the country, some of which Beijing has termed terrorism. 
 
 Police gave no reason for the attack, but China has grown increasingly nervous about Islamic militancy since a car burst into flames on the edge of Beijing's Tiananmen Square in October and 29 people were stabbed to death in March in the southwestern city of Kunming. 
 
 The government blamed militants from the restive far western region of Xinjiang for both those attacks. Xinjiang, a resource-rich and strategically located region on the borders of central Asia, has for years been beset by violence blamed by the Chinese government on Islamist militants. 
 
 Despite earlier reports on state media that up to four assailants may have been involved in the latest attack, Guangzhou police said their initial inquiry found there was just a single suspect. He had been shot and wounded. 
 
 "After verbal warnings were ineffective, police fired, hitting one male suspect holding a knife, and subdued him," Guangzhou police said on their official microblog. 
 
 They neither identified the attacker nor gave a possible motive. 
 
 Xinhua news agency said that the attacker had been hospitalized, and that police were not immediately able to identify him as he had no documents on him. 
 
 State television said that reports police had picked up another suspect near the station were also wrong, and that a person who had been detained had nothing to do with the case. 
 
 Provincial television showed pictures of what it said was an apparently injured suspect being pressed to the ground by police and plainclothes security officials, as they removed a bloodied white t-shirt. It was not possible to see the person's face. 
 
 Speaking while on a visit to Hong Kong, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel expressed "horror, outrage and sympathy" at the attack. 
 
 "We oppose terrorism in all forms, and in those instances where the available information or the information shared by the Chinese authorities pointed to terrorism by a group or individual, we have condemned it as terrorism," he said. 
 
 China last week reacted angrily to U.S. criticism of the level of cooperation from Beijing on fighting terrorism. 
 
 China blamed religious extremists for a bomb and knife attack last Wednesday at a train station in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, that killed one bystander and wounded 79. 
 
 The government called the attackers "terrorists", a term it uses to describe Islamist militants and separatists in Xinjiang who have waged a sometimes violent campaign for an independent East Turkestan state. 
 
 Exiles and rights groups say the real cause of the unrest in Xinjiang is China's heavy-handed policies, including curbs on Islam and the culture and language of the Muslim Uighur people. 
 
 China's domestic security chief, Meng Jianzhu, told a meeting of Chinese law enforcement officials on Tuesday that the government would launch "special operations against terrorism", Xinhua reported. 
 
 Meng said that the authorities would hit terrorists hard and 
 
 "deploy new technologies to detect and remove security threats", Xinhua said, without elaborating. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Li Hui and Michael Martina, and Greg Torode in HONG KONG; Editing by Nick Macfie)
– China has been hit with yet another train-station slashing, with multiple attackers wounding six people this morning. It's the third such incident in less than three months, the AP notes; just last week, three were killed at a station in Xinjiang province. Neither the attackers nor their cause has been identified in the latest brutality, but Reuters notes that there were at least two of them, and possibly four. The violence occurred at a train station in Guangdong, capital of the Guangzhou province, where police arrived with the attack under way. "After verbal warnings were ineffective, police fired, hitting one male suspect holding a knife, and subdued him," police said. Police caught another suspect as he tried to escape, according to an official news daily. One victim was critically wounded, police say. The attackers were dressed in white, with white hats; their knives were 20 inches long, said a local report, via Reuters. A store owner offered an eyewitness account: The attackers, he said, crouched on the ground for two hours near the shop as they covered their bags in clothes. Suddenly, they pulled knives from the bags and, with a yell, started hacking at victims. Recent similar attacks have been blamed on extremists in the far west of China, the AP notes.