March 5, 2014, 7:14 am
By ANDREW JACOBS
Were the assailants who slashed to death 29 people and wounded 143 others at a train station in southwestern China last Saturday aspiring jihadists or would-be refugees seeking to flee the country?
Those two opposing narratives — one issued by a Communist Party official and the other suggested by a United States government-backed news service — have emerged to explain why six men and two women ended up in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, 900 miles from their homes in the far western region of Xinjiang, where they set out to kill as many people as possible.
Although the authorities have yet to identify the ethnic identities or hometowns of those arrested, it is widely assumed that they were Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking, largely Muslim people who are increasingly at odds with the nation’s ethnic Han majority.
According to Radio Free Asia, which is financed by the United States Congress, the attackers may have been driven to desperation after their attempts to leave China were thwarted at the country’s border with Laos. Citing an anonymous source, the report said the eight had fled their hometown near the Silk Road city of Hotan last year after a violent clash with the police left scores of Uighur residents dead. The source said they gave up trying to leave through the border crossing near Mohan after 30 other Uighurs were arrested by the Chinese authorities.
“They cannot go back to Hotan, but they cannot do any business in Kunming either because they don’t have any ID cards with them and have arrest warrants issued against them by the regional police department,” Radio Free Asia said, quoting the source, whom it described as an Uighur living in Kunming.
Forlorn, he said, their desperation turned homicidal after learning about mounting bloodshed in Xinjiang, where in recent months more than 100 Uighurs have been shot and killed by the police in skirmishes that the authorities have called “terror attacks,” but that exile groups say are little more than extrajudicial killings.
“Their message to the government was, ‘We can do something also,’ ” the source said.
The opposing theory was offered by Qin Guangrong, the Communist Party secretary of Yunnan Province, who told China National Radio that the eight attackers were hoping to become overseas jihadists and had tried to leave the country through Vietnam, which shares a border with Yunnan, but failed to “get out.”
Unable to leave China or return home to Xinjiang, he said, they decided to wage “jihad” in Kunming.
Mr. Qin’s account, the report said, was based on a confession by one of the suspects, a young woman who was shot and wounded by the police at the train station. Three other suspects are also in custody. Four of the attackers were shot dead at the scene, according to state news media.
The article citing Mr. Qin’s account was deleted from the radio station’s website, but has since been picked up by other outlets.
Although the two stories clash on key points, there is some overlap, most notably the notion that the attackers had been trying to flee China before they decided to embrace violence. While impossible to determine the truth, neither theory is entirely outlandish.
Uighur fighters have been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, including 22 who ended up at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay. In 2011, the Chinese authorities said that a group of Uighurs who attacked and killed more than a dozen people in Kashgar, in southern Xinjiang, had received training in Pakistan.
But exile groups and human rights advocates say the government also exaggerates the threat of Islamic-inspired violence and brands even Uighur dissidents as separatists. In recent years, scores of Uighurs seeking to flee the country have been captured at China’s border with Southeast Asia and sent back home for punishment.
In 2009, in a case that drew international attention, 20 Uighur asylum-seekers were deported back to Xinjiang from Cambodia a day before Xi Jinping, then China’s vice president and now its president, was due to visit bearing $1.2 billion in aid.
Beijing said the Uighurs were criminals. The United Nations, which had interviewed them as part of their asylum bid, said they had credible fears of persecution.
None of the asylum-seekers has been heard from again.