China executed two people in restive far-west Xinjiang yesterday after a court convicted them over a deadly attack on police in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics last August, while a court in Tibet has condemned two people to die for their roles in violent riots in Lhasa last year, Xinhua news agency reported.
The brief report about Xinjiang did not give details of the executed, but they may have been two men sentenced to death in December. Xinhua said they were found guilty over a “terrorist attack on a frontier city’s border police that left 17 dead” and which came despite tightened security ahead of the Summer Games.
The attackers rammed a truck into police on a morning training run on Aug. 4 in the oasis city of Kashgar, following up their attack with explosives, a homemade gun and knives, state-run media reported at the time.
China had warned of unrest by groups seeking to exploit the world’s attention on China in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.
In December, two Kashgar residents, Abdurahman Azat and Kurbanjan Hemit, were convicted of homicide and illegally producing guns, ammunition and explosives by a court which sentenced them to death, Xinhua reported at the time.
Chinese officials have said Uighur militants seeking an independent “East Turkestan” are among the biggest threats to the country’s stability, a key issue ahead of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct 1.
But human rights groups and Uighur independence activists say Beijing grossly exaggerates the threat to justify harsh controls.
Meanwhile, a court in Tibet has sentenced two people to death for their roles in last year’s violent riots in Lhasa, China’s state media said on Wednesday, the first death sentences reported over the deadly unrest.
Two others were given suspended death sentences while another was given life in prison in three separate arson cases, said the report, which quoted a spokesman for the intermediate court in the Tibetan capital.
Fierce anti-China riots broke out in Lhasa in March last year and spread across Tibet and adjacent areas with Tibetan populations, deeply embarrassing the Chinese government as it was preparing to host the Beijing Summer Olympics.
The defendants all appeared to be Tibetans who carried out attacks that killed Han Chinese, according to names provided by Xinhua.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees