HONG KONG — Police arrested a man after a doctor was stabbed to death while on duty at a hospital in northwestern China.

The 54-year-old suspect, surnamed Yang, was caught on Tuesday after he allegedly attacked the 42-year-old, surnamed Feng, at Gansu Provincial People’s Hospital in Lanzhou, police said.

The suspect, who has cancer, had surgery at the hospital three years ago, when Feng was the doctor-in-charge, they said.

Investigators said they had not established a motive for the stabbing and that their inquiries were continuing.

Feng was in a consulting room at the time, a source claiming to be her colleague told medical website Dxy.cn.

She suffered more than 20 wounds and seven of those were fatal, the colleague stated. The attacker took an unidentified liquid to splash around the room, which the source said smelled like sulphuric acid.

He said Feng had a child of primary school age.

Since 2001, at least 36 Chinese doctors and medical staff have been killed in hospitals, Dxy.cn said. Some attackers were patients, while others killed doctors to vent their anger over high hospital fees.

Fatalities in the last three years included the August 2018 stabbing of a 47-year-old doctor at a military hospital in Tianjin, who was attacked by three men while on duty.

In October 2016, a 36-year-old paediatrician in the city of Laiwu, eastern Shandong province, died after being stabbed 27 times by a relative of a sick child.

“China’s medical environment is pathetic,” an orthopaedic specialist from Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province wrote on social media app WeChat.

“We have to spend more than 10 years studying and training before qualifying to be a clinical doctor. But, in the end, our pay is so little. What’s more, in this way of serving people, we might lose our life by a knife.” SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST