Chinese policemen investigate victims covered by newspapers at the site of a stabbing incident near a market in Changsha in south China's Hunan province.
A fight between two food stall owners at a market in southern China on Friday left five people hacked to death and one person fatally shot by police, authorities said.
A dispute at the market in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, erupted in a knife fight that left one of the men dead, police said in a statement. The other fled and slashed four more people while on the run before he was shot dead by police. Two of the four people died at the scene and the other two died in a hospital, police said.
The killings came two weeks after 29 people were killed and 140 others wounded in a knife attack blamed on ethnic Muslim Uighur separatists at the Kunming train station, initially raising concerns that the latest violence was ethnically motivated.
The identity of the food stall owners was not immediately clear. Online news reports posted early Friday that said they were Uighurs were later removed.