Beijing Crash May Be Tied to Unrest in Xinjiang
The New York Times, 29 October 2013
BEIJING — Five people were killed and 38 were injured on Monday when a speeding vehicle careered along a crowded sidewalk in the ceremonial heart of the Chinese capital and burst into flames at the entrance to the Forbidden City, billowing black smoke that obscured the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong.
Three of the dead were the driver and the two passengers riding in the car, and the other two were pedestrians — a Filipino woman and a man from Guangdong Province in southern China — according to the authorities. They quickly sealed the area around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, which is normally packed with thousands of tourists.
Late Monday night, the police sent a notice to hotels in Beijing seeking information about “suspicious guests” and naming two suspects from Xinjiang, the troubled region in China’s far west whose ethnic Uighur population has become increasingly disenchanted with Chinese policies.
Hypersensitive to any unscripted news happening in the center of Beijing, the government had sought earlier to restrict coverage of the episode and promptly deleted witness photographs and related postings on social media. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman declined to respond to a question about whether the episode had been a terrorist attack.
But witness accounts suggested the driver had deliberately steered the vehicle more than 400 yards along the sidewalk and had rammed into a marble railing of the Jinshui Bridge, built to traverse the moat that encircles the vast imperial residence that served generations of Chinese rulers.
“This was not some driver who took a wrong turn and accidentally ended up on the sidewalk,” one witness said.
Southern Metropolis Daily, a newspaper based in Guangdong, quoted a Filipino tourist as saying the driver had repeatedly honked the car’s horn, suggesting an attempt to alert pedestrians.
Ringed by steel barriers, heavily policed by plainclothes officers and watched over by countless security cameras, the entrances to the Forbidden City and the adjoining Tiananmen Square have long been a magnet for political protest, most notably the 1989 student demonstrations that were crushed by force.
In 2011, a man protesting the unfavorable outcome of a legal grievance set fire to himself near the Jinshui Bridge. Two years earlier, a man set fire to himself near the same spot. In 2001, two people died and three others were injured after they set fire to themselves in the square, although details of that episode remain murky.
In 2009, three people set themselves and their car on fire at Wangfujing, a shopping street just east of the square, in what has been described as a protest against illegal land seizures.
In recent years, the police have introduced increasingly tight security around Tiananmen Square that includes searching the belongings of visitors and questioning those they believe fit the description of petitioners, the aggrieved citizens who flock to the capital in what is often a futile quest for justice. Fire extinguishers can be seen arranged at lampposts across the square.
The episode on Monday occurred shortly after noon, when the sport utility vehicle made a sharp turn onto the sidewalk alongside Chang’an Avenue and raced toward the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. One man who happened upon the area minutes afterward described an eerily quiet scene, with a half-dozen people lying motionless on the pavement.
“It almost felt like performance art, with people standing around in shock, unsure of what had just happened,” said the man, a foreign visitor who declined to give his name.
In locking down the area, the police immediately closed a busy subway station, shooed away tourists and detained several foreign journalists, including two reporters for Agence France-Presse, who were forced to delete images from their cameras. Armored vehicles and paramilitary police officers swarmed the area, and bomb-sniffing dogs roamed a broader zone that included Zhongnanhai, the walled compound that houses the Chinese leadership, and the Great Hall of the People, home to the legislature. Witnesses said municipal workers had arrived quickly with long-handled brushes to wash away the pools of blood.
Photographs posted online showing a vehicle engulfed in flames were quickly deleted; one subsequent photograph showed the police erecting green panels of fabric in an effort to conceal the charred wreck from passing traffic.
The police notice issued to Beijing hotels Monday night suggested that the authorities were looking for additional cars that may have been involved in the episode. It asked for help identifying suspicious guests and “illegal vehicles” that might have been spotted as early as Oct. 1 , and listed four license plate numbers with the regional prefix for Xinjiang.
For hours after the episode, crowds of disappointed tourists milled outside police barriers waiting for the street to reopen. When asked why the sidewalk was closed, one police officer said, “It’s a special kind of activity, but we don’t know what kind.”
Then he added: “Don’t worry. It will be over tomorrow.”
Chen Jiehao contributed research.