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Blast in western Chinese city kills 7

20 August 2010 00:58 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A bomb exploded Thursday in a crowd in Aksu city, in China’s restive western Xinjiang region, killing seven people and wounding at least a dozen others in the first major incident since bloody ethnic rioting shook the area a year ago, APA reports quoting The Washington Post.
A spokeswoman for the Xinjiang government, Hou Hanmin said authorities have arrested one suspect, whom she described as a member of the country’s Muslim Uighur ethnic group. She said most of the victims also were Uighurand that some of the injuries were serious.
In a telephone interview, Hou said it was too early to say whether the suspect was connected with one of the separatist organizations that Beijing has labeled as terrorist groups. "The explosion was not an accident," Hou said. "It was an intentional, man-made explosion. Whether it’s a terrorist attack or not, I can’t draw that conclusion right now. We still need time to investigate."
The bomb was apparently carried aboard a three-wheeled vehicle.
According to an Aksu resident who works for a local transport company, the explosion occurred at about 10:30 a.m. Thursday on a bypass road of the main highway connecting Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, with Kashgar in the west. He said he heard from other residents that the vehicle may have exploded after it was stopped by local security volunteers at a checkpoint, but he could not confirm that.
"The sound was loud," he said when reached by telephone. "But I thought it was a tire of a vehicle exploding." He said his company had an emergency meeting and organized the workers to be on duty at night to patrol and look for any suspicious people.
Xinjiang had been under heavy security this summer, with authorities fearing another outburst of violence on the anniversary of the July 5, 2009, rioting in Urumqi between the minority Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority. The violence last year left nearly 200 people dead and many shops and businesses torched. Two dozen people were executed on charges of involvement in the rioting, and hundreds remain missing, presumably detained.
The Aksu resident said the added security in the city was relaxed this month, after the anniversary passed without incident.
Shortly before Thursday’s explosion, the Xinjiang governor, Nur Bekri, told journalists that the region faces a "long and fierce and very complicated struggle," the Associated Press reported from Urumqi.
"Separatism in Xinjiang has a very long history," he said. "It was there in the past, it is still here now, and it will continue in the future."
The Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language, consider Xinjiang their homeland, although they now are a minority after years of Han Chinese migration to the area. Many have said the outburst of violence last year was a result of pent-up anger and frustration at the Chinese government’s heavy-handed tactics in imposing its control over the region.
In an effort to show a softer touch, Beijing in April replaced the longtime Communist Party chief in Xinjiang, who was considered a hard-liner. The new party boss, Zhang Chunxian, immediately restored Internet access and seemed to emphasize building Xinjiang’s economy.
Chinese officials lately have been touting their efforts to develop Xinjiang, and this week the Foreign Ministry is hosting a group of foreign journalists on a tightly-scripted tour of Xinjiang to show off China’s development projects.
China has also been promoting tourism in Xinjiang, particularly in the far western city of Kashgar, as a way to alleviate persistently high unemployment in the area. In another effort to try to improve the local economy -- and ease ethnic tensions in the process -- Chinese authorities recently said Kashgar would soon be designated a new "economic development zone" for investment and could become a major trading hub for China’s Central Asian neighbors.
Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at Minzu University of China in Beijing and a leading Uighur academic, said Xinjiang residents were largely willing to wait to see if the new party secretary keeps his promises and improves the economy.
"Ordinary people are waiting and observing the effects of the policy," he said. If the policy fails and makes people disappointed, I don’t know what some people will choose to do." He said that "most people choose silence as their protest" and that Chinese authorities often exaggerate incidents of unrest to justify their strict security measures.
Chinese officials repeatedly point to Xinjiang as the country’s greatest "terrorist threat."
Two months ago, the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing held a rare press conference to announce that police had cracked what they called a "terrorist cell," detaining 10 people linked to the outlawed East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which seeks an independent Xinjiang.
At the press conference, Wu Heping, a ministry spokesman, showed reporters slides of knives, pipe bombs, a minivan purportedly intended to carry a car bomb, and a kitchen allegedly used to make explosives.
"The breakup of the major terrorist ring proves once again that terrorist groups, including the ETIM, remain the principal terrorist threat facing China now and in the future," Wu said.
The ETIM has been blamed for several attacks in 2008, including an assault on border police in Kashgar that killed 17 people at the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing.