Japanese students injured in stabbing during entrance exams

TOKYO - Several high school students sitting their university entrance exam in Tokyo were wounded on Saturday (Jan 15) in an apparent knife attack, Japanese media said.

Public broadcaster NHK said three people were conscious after being injured in the morning when another student attacked them with a bladed object as they gathered to take their entrance exam at University of Tokyo.

The alleged assailant, a 17-year-old high school student, was arrested, the Asahi newspaper said.

According to local media reports, the suspect was also responsible for a fire at the nearby Todaimae station on Saturday morning.

Half a million high school students across Japan are taking the annual university entrance exams this weekend in hundreds of venues across the country.

Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department said it could not comment on the details of the attack nor confirm any arrests.

Violent crimes are exceedingly rare in Japan, but there have been a spate of knife attacks by assailants unknown to the victims.

In November last year, a 14-year-old junior high school boy in central Japan died after being stabbed by another student in the same school.

In October last year, a man dressed in Batman's Joker costume stabbed more than a dozen people on a train in Tokyo, sending passengers screaming down the aisles of train carriages and scrambling out of windows to escape.

A few months earlier, a man wounded several people in a knife attack on a Tokyo commuter train.