Students of a Beijing primary school and their parents were in shock that a maintenance worker attacked a group of children with a hammer on Tuesday after learning that his employment contract would be terminated.

The 49-year-old man surnamed Jia, from Heilongjiang province, had been working via an employment agency in the maintenance department at a campus of the No. 1 Affiliated Elementary School of Xuanwu Normal School in Xicheng district. His contract was to end this month and the agency decided not to renew it, the Xicheng government said in a statement released on Tuesday evening.

Police said that Jia began attacking children with a hammer at 11:17 a.m. because he had lost his job.

Twenty schoolchildren were injured, three of them seriously. All the injured children were sent to hospitals for treatment and none are currently considered to be in life-threatening condition. Jia has been placed in criminal detention and the case is being further investigated, according to the statement.

Wang Shaofeng, Xicheng district chief said on Tuesday night that security at all schools in the district has been stepped up.

Many of the wounded students had head injuries. Four, whose skulls were fractured in the attack, require surgery. A student who had the most severe head injury was still undergoing surgery at 9 p.m. The operations on the other three students had been successfully completed, Li Jia, deputy Party chief of Capital Medical University Xuanwu Hospital, said at a news conference.

Liu Yuhui, head of Beijing Education Commission, said schools have been instructed to run thorough security checks on school workers.

One student's mother, who wished not to be identified, said, "I was very anxious after learning about the incident in the morning from the WeChat group for parents of the schoolchildren, and I immediately rushed to the school."

She said her second-grade son witnessed the attack. "He told me he saw a bad guy charging toward the children. He didn't say a word on our way home."

The school campus is primarily for second- and third-graders ages 7 and 8. Crime scene investigators were seen entering the school on Tuesday afternoon as many parents waited to pick up their children.

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