SUZHOU, China/TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A Chinese court on Thursday sentenced a man to death over a knife attack near Shanghai last June that injured a Japanese mother and her child and killed a Chinese bus attendant trying to stop him, Japan's government said.

The Suzhou Intermediate People's Court said the Chinese jobless man named Zhou Jiasheng, 52, convicted of stabbing the three at a Japanese school bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, on June 24, was "debt-ridden" and did not want to continue living, a government official told reporters in Tokyo.

While there had been speculation that Zhou might have targeted Japanese nationals, the court made no mention of Japan in rendering the ruling, the official said. Japanese Consul General in Shanghai Masaru Okada and other consulate staff were present at the court to hear the ruling.

The case, followed by another fatal stabbing by a Chinese man of a schoolboy whose father is Japanese in the southern city of Shenzhen in September, has attracted considerable attention in Japan, fueling safety concerns among its citizens living in China.

The crime was "extremely heinous and made a huge social impact, therefore it deserves the death penalty," the court was quoted by the official as saying.

The bus attendant, Hu Youping, 54, died of stab wounds days after trying to stop the attack.

In responding to the ruling, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said, "The crime, which killed one person and wounded two, including an innocent child, is totally unacceptable," adding that Tokyo will continue to demand that Beijing ensures the safety of Japanese residents in China.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a news conference in Beijing that China will continue to take the same measures to protect foreign citizens in China "as before" while avoiding any direct reference to the ruling.

Before the ruling, Chinese authorities had not disclosed the motive and other details of the rampage, calling it an "isolated incident."

Zhou was a resident in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, next to Jiangsu, and had come to Suzhou before committing the crime, the Japanese government official said, citing the court.

It held the first hearing of the case on Jan. 9.

The Japanese woman in her 30s had been waiting with her son of preschool age for her older child to return from school before the knife attack.

In the Sept. 18 incident in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, the 10-year-old son of a Japanese father and Chinese mother was fatally stabbed on his way to a Japanese school. The first court hearing in the case is scheduled to be held Friday.