Three Han Chinese officials were murdered in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region while Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was visiting the area, home to mainly-Muslim Uighurs, according to a report and online postings.
The trio were killed late last month while on a fishing trip in Kargilik County in Kashgar Prefecture, the US-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA) said on Wednesday, quoting local police authorities.
“Two of the men had their throats cut and were dumped into the lake, while the third one was stabbed in 31 places before he was also pushed into the lake,” RFA quoted Enver Tursun, deputy chief of the Janggilieski police station, as saying.
The far western region is periodically hit by unrest, which Chinese authorities blame on separatists from the area. Rights groups say tensions are driven mainly by cultural oppression, intrusive security measures and immigration by Han, China’s ethnic majority.
All three victims transferred to Xinjiang two years ago and were senior county-level officials, with one heading a bank and the other two working in telecommunications, RFA said.
Xi was in Kashgar on the same day of the murders to visit armed police units and stress the “gravity and complexity” of anti-terrorism efforts in the area, according to a previous report by Xinhua news agency.
On the last day of Xi’s four-day trip to the region, assailants using knives and explosive devices struck at a rail station in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, leaving three dead — including two attackers — and 79 wounded.
Police have identified three to five initial suspects from more than 150 people interrogated over the murder case, RFA said, and cited an unnamed local official saying they believe the offenders were from a village “which is 99 percent Uighur.”
China’s state-controlled media has remained silent on the incident, but an online statement allegedly signed by the three men’s widows pleading for justice has been circulating Internet forums.
The note — dated May 3 — complained that Kargilik authorities had attempted to cover the incident up and pressured the relatives to bury the bodies “as soon as possible,” according to a reposting on www.hanminzu.org, a US-registered Han nationalist Web site.
“The government is so weak and incapable... It cannot firmly fight the arrogance of the violent terrorists,” it read. “How can we dare to go out in the future?”
It did not mention the dead men’s ethnicity or their posts.
A user of Chinese miroblogging site Sina Weibo who often posts pictures of himself in Xinjiang earlier this month wrote that a friend’s uncle and two other people were killed by “thugs” on April 27. The post has been deleted, but can be seen on freeweibo.com, a site that tracks censored Weibo messages.
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