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?
Chinese authorities are likely to further crack down on dissent in the restive Xinjiang region after a bloody train station knife attack that Beijing blames on militants, an exiled Uighur leader said on Tuesday.
A group of knife-wielding attackers who went on a weekend slashing spree at a train station in China's southern Yunnan province may have been disgruntled ethnic minority Uyghur asylum seekers who felt "trapped" between violence in their Xinjiang homeland and the inability to flee across the border into Laos, sources say.
China says the vicious slashing spree that killed 29 people in a southern city was the work of separatists linked to international terrorism, but the assailants' homespun methods and low-tech weapons — nothing more than long knives — have led some analysts to suspect they didn't get outside help.
Reporters Without Borders condemns the censorship that the Chinese authorities have imposed on the media in the wake of the attack by people armed with knives on travellers at the main station in Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, on 1 March.
Chinese authorities have barred detained Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti's lawyer from meeting with the professor's wife, while it remains unclear whether the government intends to prosecute Tohti for the state security crime of “separatism,” which can result in the death penalty, or for the lesser crime of “inciting separatism,” according to the wife and a human rights group.
March 1, 2014
Philip Wen, Sanghee Liu
The symbolic heart of power in China, Tiananmen Square, is among the most tightly controlled areas in Beijing. But on October 28 last year, shortly after noon, the constant police presence and surveillance was undone by a rudimentary plot.
The Chinese government should immediately drop all charges against the Uighur economist Ilham Tohti and release him, Human Rights Watch said today.
We have learned of the formal arrest of Ilham Tohti, renowned professor of economics at the Central Nationalities University
A prominent Uighur economist who has been charged with separatism in China's far western Xinjiang region was denied access to legal counsel on Thursday, his lawyer said, on grounds that the case involves "state secrets".
