A Chinese court sentenced three men to death on Monday for their roles in carrying out an attack near the entrance to Beijing\u2019s Forbidden City in October that left five people dead and 40 injured, in what the police said was a terrorist act carried out by Islamic jihadists belonging to the Uighur ethnic minority.<\/p>\n
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE
June 16, 2014 3:12 am<\/p>\n
A Chinese court sentenced three men to death<\/a> on Monday for their roles in carrying out an attack near the entrance to Beijing\u2019s Forbidden City in October that left five people dead and 40 injured, in what the police said<\/a> was a terrorist act carried out by Islamic jihadists belonging to the Uighur ethnic minority.<\/p>\n On Oct. 28, a vehicle drove<\/a> onto a crowded sidewalk on the north side of Tiananmen Square and ignited near the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong, killing the three passengers inside and two tourists. On Monday, a court in Xinjiang, the northwestern region where most Uighurs live, sentenced Husanjan Wuxur, Yusup Umarniyaz and Yusup Ahmat to death, another person to life in prison and four others to sentences ranging from five to 20 years for \u201corganizing and leading a terrorist group and endangering public security with dangerous methods,\u201d according to Xinhua, the state news agency.<\/p>\n The attack was part of a new surge in violence attributed to Uighurs, some of whom want to establish an independent East Turkestan. In the past, the violence was contained mostly in Xinjiang, an oil-rich region of some 22 million people, more than 40 percent of whom are Uighurs. The October attack was followed by one in March carried out by knife-wielding assailants at a train station in Kunming, a city in southwestern China. That attack<\/a> left 29 dead and 143 wounded and was also attributed to Uighurs.<\/p>\n Some Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic people, have been attracted to jihadist methods, including suicide attacks, in their efforts to rebel against Chinese rule. The police investigating the Tiananmen attack said they recovered a banner bearing \u201creligious extremist messages\u201d from the burned vehicle.<\/p>\n That attack also signaled an escalation in the central government\u2019s response, leading to an increased police and paramilitary crackdown on terrorism suspects and a further narrowing of any room for public debate on economic and political factors that may be contributing to increased violence on the part of Uighurs.<\/p>\n After the attack, Ilham Tohti, a Uighur and economics professor then in Beijing, criticized the government for the lack of details about the case, and the paucity of independent reporting.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a lot of questions about what happened,\u201d Mr. Tohti said<\/a> in a telephone interview in October with The New York Times. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to point to a banner, but we\u2019re only getting one side of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n