Seven slashed in school machete attack during teddy bears’ picnic
This week in 1996, a man attacked three children and four women with a machete at an infant school teddy bears’ picnic in Wolverhampton. They were enjoying a ‘teddy bears’ picnic’ at St Luke’s Church of England school when paranoid schizophrenic Horrett Irving Campbell jumped over the fence, whipped out a machete, and launched a frenzied assault on the nursery group.
Emergencyservicesarrived on the scene within seconds of receiving reports of the attack. The victims were taken by West Midlands Ambulance Service to New Cross Hospital where they were treated for stab wounds.
Coming just four months after the Dunblane Primary School massacre, the incident once again brought the issue of security in and around schools into sharp focus.
On March 7 1997, a jury found Irving Campbell guilty of seven counts of attempted murder and other crimes related to the incident. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Nursery nurse Lisa Potts was later awarded the George Medal for her bravery in protecting the children during the attack, in which she suffered severe injuries.
Elsewhere this week in 1996, an outbreak of E.coli food poisoning in Japan resulted in 6,000 children falling ill – including two deaths – after a group of school pupils had eaten contaminated lunches.
It was Japan’s worst case of food poisoning since salmonella bacteria sickened more than 10,000 in 1988, and the toll continued to rise at a shocking pace – at the height of the epidemic, more than 1,000 new cases were being reported each day.
In other news, the Paris and Rome-bound TWA Flight 800 (Boeing 747) exploded off the coast of Long Island, New York, killing all 230 people on board.
Amid speculation that a terrorist attack had been the cause of the crash, the FBI initiated a criminal investigation. However, 16 months later, they announced that no evidence had been found of a criminal act and closed their active investigation.