The Chinese authorities provided new details on Thursday about a violent clash in the Xinjiang region of western China last weekend that they said had left 50 people dead and more than 50 others injured.<\/p>\n
By DAN LEVINSEPT. 25, 2014<\/p>\n
BEIJING \u2014 The Chinese authorities provided new details on Thursday about a violent clash in the Xinjiang region of western China last weekend that they said had left 50 people dead and more than 50 others injured.<\/p>\n
According to the government-run Tianshan website, a series of bomb blasts on Sunday killed six people in Luntai County, southwest of the regional capital, Urumqi. Security forces later fatally shot people whom the report described as rioters; 40 died, including people who blew themselves up, the report said. <\/strong> Four police officers were also killed, the report said.<\/p>\n \u201cPublic security dealt with the situation decisively,\u201d the article said, quoting local police officials. It described the episode as a terrorist attack.<\/p>\n Previous reports in the state news media had said the violence in Luntai County claimed just two lives, and it was unclear why the authorities had waited five days to disclose further details.<\/p>\n The newest report, released late Thursday night, said the attack had been organized by Mamat Turson, a laborer who it said harbored \u201creligious extremist\u201d views. Although the article did not describe the suspect\u2019s ethnic identity, his name suggests he is a member of the region\u2019s Uighur minority.<\/p>\n As with much of the bloodshed in Xinjiang, outside groups offered a starkly different version of events. Radio Free Asia, citing local officials and witnesses, said the violence had begun after residents angry about forced evictions raided government offices and a police station in Luntai, which is also known by its Uighur name, Bugur. At some point, the report said, assailants lobbed explosive devices at the police station.<\/p>\n \u201cI assume there are about 100 people with injuries, because all the hospital beds are occupied right now,\u201d Radio Free Asia quoted a nurse as saying. The news service, which is based in Washington and financed by the American government, employs Uighur-speaking reporters.<\/p>\n The Radio Free Asia report said the injured included 20 police officers and at least one person suspected of being an assailant.<\/p>\n \u201cOn Monday, there were over 30 family members coming to collect the corpses,\u201d said a man who answered the phone at the Luntai County morgue and who declined to give his name.<\/p>\n In a microblog post on Monday, a local student wrote, \u201cNow, no matter what hospital you go to in Luntai, you see the people injured from yesterday\u2019s blast.\u201d<\/p>\n The episode was the latest outbreak of violence in Xinjiang, a vast expanse of desert and mountains that has been flooded with Chinese security forces.<\/p>\n Government officials have blamed religious extremists for the increasing bloodshed, which has killed more than 200 people in the past year. The region is the traditional homeland of China\u2019s Uighurs, a Sunni Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority who have chafed at Beijing\u2019s iron-fisted rule since Communist troops ended a fleeting experiment with independence more than six decades ago.<\/p>\n Uighur exile groups and international human rights advocates say the government often exaggerates the role of foreign-backed Islamists. They blame official restrictions on religion, language and culture, as well as mounting discrimination, for radicalizing a growing number of Uighurs.<\/p>\n Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said much of the recent violence in Xinjiang consisted of spontaneous acts of resistance by disaffected Uighurs. \u201cBeijing has invested in building infrastructure, but not in creating reconciliation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Although the report on the Tianshan website on Thursday was short on details, it described the violence as a well-organized \u201cterror attack.\u201d It said explosive devices had been set off in several locations in Luntai, including at a farmers\u2019 market, in the doorway of a shop and outside two police stations.<\/p>\n The blasts killed six and wounded 54, a mix of Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation\u2019s dominant ethnic group. The report said that two of the assailants had been arrested.<\/p>\n The article cast Mamat Turson, accused of being the mastermind of the violence, as a religious extremist who had refused to eat at the home of his parents, described as public servants, because they refused to cook halal food. \u201cHe didn\u2019t even attend his father\u2019s funeral or participate in his brother\u2019s wedding,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n Mamat Turson, it added, was among those killed in the attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Chinese authorities provided new details on Thursday about a violent clash in the Xinjiang region of western China last weekend that they said had left 50 people dead and more than 50 others injured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}