Residents in Urumqi demanded further action yesterday after the sacking of two top officials in the restive Xinjiang region over syringe attacks that sparked deadly protests.
The Communist Party chief of Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi and the region’s top police official were dismissed on Saturday in the wake of the protests that left five people dead, but residents said the sackings were not enough.
“They [the sackings] will have a small impact, but this is not really what we wanted,” said Du Xuelian, a clerk in a shop selling eyeglasses in Urumqi. “We want them to solve these problems. Changing officials isn’t really the answer.”
The protests in Urumqi began on Wednesday, with angry citizens demanding the government act to stop a spate of mysterious syringe attacks, just under two months after ethnic riots in the city left nearly 200 mostly Han Chinese dead, according to Beijing.
Calm only returned to the northwestern city on Saturday.
Liu Jialong, the owner of another glasses shop, called on the new officials to act firmly.
“This [the sackings] will definitely have an impact, but long term, to solve all these problems, it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort,” he said. “We hope the new officials will have greater resolve in handling these affairs.”
Yesterday, life in Urumqi began to return to normal, with pedestrians and traffic back on the streets, but in a sign that the situation was still tense, thousands of armed police were spread out in the city and officers searched the bags of passing men and women in the traditional Uighur district, as plainclothes officials looked on.
“It’s really sad to live like this,” said a 37-year-old store owner, who refused to be named — a member of the mainly Muslim Uighur minority. “We don’t know how long it will be before we can relax again.”
More than 530 people have gone to hospital after being stabbed with syringes in Urumqi in the past few weeks, official media said, and authorities have stressed that both Han and Uighurs were victims of the attacks.
China has arrested four people in connection with the stabbings and four others are to be criminally prosecuted.
Prosecutor Udgar Abdulrahman told journalists that in one case, a 47-year-old Uighur man assaulted police with a syringe containing heroin.
In another case, two drug addicts — a Uighur man and woman — threatened a taxi driver with a syringe and robbed him, before being arrested.
A panel of medical specialists told reporters it had examined the records of 217 victims and so far there was no evidence they had contracted diseases related to radioactive substances, anthrax, hepatitis B or AIDS.
Beijing has long contended it faces a major Islamic separatist threat originating in Xinjiang.
It blamed the July unrest on “separatists,” but Uighurs say it was sparked when Chinese security forces reacted harshly to peaceful protests over an earlier factory brawl in southern China.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS