An angry laid-off construction worker bombs his former company. A man being questioned about a domestic quarrel blows up a police station. An extortionist sets off an explosion in a movie theater.
Now, police are searching for a man suspected in yet another string of explosions Friday in a northern industrial city that killed at least 108 people.
The bomb is the weapon of choice in China. While private guns are rare, explosives are readily available for mining or construction. And the range of angry or opportunistic attackers spans the spectrum from gangsters to Muslim guerrillas to jilted lovers.
Though China doesn't release statistics, state media suggest the number of bombings is on the rise.
"It has to have something to do with the general lack of availability of guns, and the availability of something else," said Harold Travers, a criminologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Industrial explosives are for sale in many areas without a permit. In rural regions where making fireworks is a cottage industry, general stores sell ingredients for gunpowder.
Cruder explosives are also widely available. Farmers have easy access to nitrogen-heavy chemical fertilizers similar to those used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
"Even though public security authorities have ruled that dangerous explosives should be manufactured, kept and disposed of by selected persons, economic development has made them widely available," said Jin Qigao, a criminologist at the East China Politics and Law Institute in Shanghai.
Four men said to be part of a crime ring were executed last July after being convicted of killing four police officers by blowing up their car. Police said the gang in the northwestern city of Yinchuan used dynamite stolen from a coal mine.
Separatist guerrillas in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang have waged a bombing campaign since the mid-1990s in their war against Chinese rule.
In Tibet, a focus of anti-Chinese unrest, at least eight bombs in the past five years have rocked Lhasa. The most recent was in October at a courthouse.
In 1998, a man was arrested on charges of planting bombs in the restrooms of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's restaurants. Police said he tried to extort money from the American-owned fast-food chains.
A man summoned by police in the southwestern city of Chongqing in December over a quarrel with his wife brought along a homemade bomb. It went off in the police station, killing the man, his wife, a police officer and a bystander.
Tensions are worsening as China's shift to a free market deepens the divide between successful firms and armies of laid-off workers.
A construction worker angry at being fired bombed a company dormitory in August in southern China. The bomber killed himself, his former boss and two others.
A month later, a police chief in southeastern China was killed by a bomb thrown through his window.
In September, a man armed with a bomb tried to rob a bus in the southern province of Jiangxi. The bomb went off, apparently by accident, killing the robber and three passengers.
Then there is the March 6 explosion that killed 42 people, most of them children, at a schoolhouse in the southern Province of Jiangxi.
Parents say children were forced to assemble fireworks to make money for the school. But authorities once again blamed a bomber -- a deranged loner they said set off a sack of fireworks in a crowded classroom.
Police say they are looking for a lone bomber in the blasts Friday in the northern industrial center of Shijiazhuang.
The city already had suffered a string of attacks by another man accused of setting off bombs in a movie theater, a bus and near a shopping center. A court sentenced him to death in November. News reports said he previously tried to extort money from the city government.
The No. 3 Cotton Mill where Jin worked suffered the worst damage Friday when a five-story building housing 48 families was reduced to a heap of rubble.
"There have been a lot of layoffs here," said an employee of another mill who gave only her surname, Hu. "That's all I can say."
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