Report of Clash Disputes China's Account
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BEIJING — The latest report about a confrontation on Wednesday in the far western region of Xinjiang appeared to contradict versions carried by the state media that suggested the police had killed "violent terrorists" on their way to jihad training.
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The
seven people killed were all Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority that is widespread in southern Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia reported, though it could not be independently confirmed. The
Uighurs resent the rule of ethnic Han, the dominant group in China, especially the government-encouraged migration of Han to the region.
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A report on Thursday by Xinhua, the state news agency, said that police officers had engaged in a shootout with 15 terrorist suspects who had abducted two people, and that seven of the suspects and one police officer had been killed. Xinhua did not specify the ethnicity of the gunmen.
An article on Friday in The Global Times, a state-run newspaper, said that a group of
kidnappers had been trying to cross into Central Asia to undergo "jihadist training" and had abducted two herdsmen to force them to guide the group in Pishan County. Four of the 15 people were detained, and four others were injured, the article said.The report by Radio Free Asia, which is financed by the United States government and has a Uighur-language service, said the
group was trying to leave the country so that it could freely practice Islam, the religion of most Uighurs.
The Chinese Communist Party carefully controls expressions of Islam and other religions throughout China. The report made no reference to a kidnapping and said the group had been stopped by the police on the way to the border.
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Radio Free Asia cited interviews with people in the region. It quoted the chief of Mukula village, where the confrontation took place, as saying that two women were among those killed by the police; they were identified as Burabiye Anduqadir, 29, and Buzohre Seydehmet. The police had their bodies, said the village chief, Minever Ehmet."The four captives are children aged 7 to 17 years of age," he said. "One child is an elementary school student in second grade. They are being interrogated by the county."
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The chief of No. 8 hamlet in Mukula village said two of the people killed were from his area. "Their names are Ablikim Abduqadir, 40, and Hebibulla Abduqadir, 26," the hamlet chief, Memet Eziz Hapiz, told Radio Free Asia.Accounts varied of the number of people said to have been taken into custody, ranging from four to eight, the report said.
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In recent years, violence has erupted in parts of Xinjiang where tensions between Uighurs and the Han are strongest.
Often, multiple versions of the stories behind the events emerge days after the first reports by Chinese news media. The worst outbreak of violence took place in July 2009, when rioting in the regional capital of Urumqi resulted in the
deaths of at least 197 people and left more than 1,700 wounded, most of them ethnic Han, according to the government.
