Police in Henan province on Tuesday gave a detailed account of how the confessed knifeman Min Yongjun had been driven by "doomsday" rumors to carry out a frenzied attack on children.

Twenty-three elementary-school children and an elderly woman were wounded in the attack last week. None of them is in critical condition.

Ouyang Mingxing, deputy director of the Guangshan county bureau of public security, said Min, 36, confessed during police inquiries that he believed "he was doomed and hoped to do things to make the world remember him before he died."

Police quoted Min's testimony, in which he said he had watched reports about a kindergarten killing on television two years ago and realized that such attacks could draw attention.

He was referring to three kindergarten attacks between April and May of 2010 in Jiangsu, Shandong and Shaanxi provinces. In the Shaanxi case, seven children and two women were killed by a lone assailant armed with a kitchen cleaver.

The police officer said the night before the Friday stabbing spree, Min had beaten up his parents and his two daughters, aged 9 and 2, and run out of the house. He said he was angry because his father had grounded him for several days after he had an epileptic seizure.

He wandered around in the cold and dark, feeling as if he had been "abandoned by the world". At dawn, the exhausted Min knocked on the door of an elderly woman's house.

He then broke into the house and used a kitchen knife to slash the woman twice before storming into the nearby Chenpeng Village Elementary School around 7 am, when children were carrying out cleaning and preparation work.

According to a surveillance tape provided by the school, no security staff or teachers came to stop Min while he hacked his way to the third floor of the building.

Ouyang said Min had intended to throw a child out of a window, but abandoned the idea after seeing children drenched in blood downstairs, which caused him to think of his own children.

"Those second thoughts, which he talked about in the testimony, suggested the epileptic was fully conscious and able to control himself at the time of the crime," Ouyang said.

Min told police he had listened to "doomsday" preaching delivered by a local woman named Jin Guozhu.