New | Kunming citizens out in force for blood donation drive to help railway attack victims

With numerous casualties of Saturday’s brutal Kunming railway station attack still being treated at hospital, the city’s residents have banded together to help the victims however they could – whether through expressions of sympathy, or more importantly, in blood.

Citizens flocked to blood donation centres on Sunday, after the media reported that all trauma patients and around 70 others in serious condition were still being treated at 11 hospitals in Kunming.

Watch: Kunming residents queue to donate blood after train station attack

Knife-wielding assailants, reportedly from the restive Xinjing province, went on a stabbing rampage at the railway station, leaving at least 29 civilians dead and some 140 injured.

Twelve blood-collection vans were sent on Sunday around the Kunming, a city of three million people. By 1.40am on Monday, when the last van returned, 2,464 citizens had donated 70.38 litres of blood – the most ever collected in a day by the blood bank since it was established more than three decades ago, according to Zhu Xiangming, spokesman of the Kunming Blood Centre.