China suspects Tiananmen crash caused by suicide attack

BEIJING, Oct 29: Chinese authorities investigating what could be Beijing’s first major suicide attack were searching for two men from Xinjiang on Tuesday after three people suspected to be from the restive region drove an SUV into a crowd at Tiananmen Square and set it on fire.

They killed themselves and two tourists on Monday in the square, the heart of China’s power structure and the focal point of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989.

Police have spread a dragnet across the capital, checking hotels and vehicles, seeking two people suspected to be ethnic Uighurs, a Muslim minority from Xinjiang in China’s far west, on the borders of ex-Soviet Central Asia.

Two sources said on Tuesday the crash, that also injured 38 bystanders at perhaps the most closely guarded location in China, was suspected of being a suicide attack carried out by people from Xinjiang. It was initially believed to be an accident.

The sources did not specifically say the deceased were Uighurs, many of whom chafe at Chinese controls on their culture and religion. “It looks like a pre-meditated suicide attack,” said a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

There have been suicide bombings before in China, and in Beijing, mostly by people with personal grievances, but none have targeted the very heart of China’s government.

China has blamed Uighur separatists and religious extremists for a series of attacks in Xinjiang, saying they want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan. Rights groups and exiles say China massively over-states the threat.

In 2009, nearly 200 people were killed in clashes between Uighurs and ethnic Chinese in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. But the unrest has never before spilled over into the nation’s capital, despite speculation in 1997 that Uighurs were to blame for a Beijing bus bomb in which at least two people died.

The Uighurs are also not known to have previously carried out any suicide attack.

The government has given no official word whether it was an accident or an attack, and state media has mostly kept to reporting brief statements from the police and official Xinhua news agency giving a bare bones account of what happened, as is common for such sensitive events.

Police are still investigating and have yet to determine the identities of the three people in the sport utility vehicle but suspect they are from Xinjiang, according to the sources. The other dead were a Chinese man and a Filipina woman, both tourists.—Reuters