Chinese police hunt 10 relatives of Xinjiang train station bomber
The Guardian, 4 May 2014
Chinese police are hunting 10 family members of a bomber who attacked a train station in the far-western Xinjiang region last week, as high-level authorities, rattled by the incident, seek to rush the introduction of an anti-terrorism law.
The attack killed three people and injured 79 in the regional capital Urumqi at 7.10pm on Wednesday, hours after China’s president Xi Jinping wrapped up a four-day trip to the region. State media blamed two “religious extremists” for the attack, both of whom died in the blast. Only one has been identified: Sedirdin Sawut, a 39-year-old man from Aksu prefecture, an arid, cotton-growing area in the region’s south.
Xinjiang police have posted a notice offering a 100,000 yuan (£9,470) reward for more information on the suspects’ movements before the attack, according to the South China Morning Post newspaper. They also urged local authorities to track down 10 of Sawut’s family members, including his wife, brothers, cousins, 69-year-old father and 77-year-old father-in-law. A headshot of Sawut from a police notice shows a fair-skinned man with a narrow face, bushy moustache, and short black hair.
Xinjiang, a resource-rich and strategically located swath of deserts and mountains in China’s far north-west, has been under Beijing’s control since 1949. More than 40% of its 22 million people are Uighur, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group with strong cultural ties to central Asia.
In the past year, more than 100 people have died in attacks in the region, most of them clashes between Uighurs and local police. Uighur groups abroad call the attacks a cry of despair caused by religious repression and economic marginalisation. The government defends its regional policies as open and tolerant, blaming the attacks on religious extremism and “hostile forces” from abroad.
The Urumqi train station has been operating under heavy security since the bombing, the first in the capital since 1997. According to state media, the two suspects preceded the blast with a stabbing spree at a station exit, possibly timed to coincide with the arrival of a train from the southwestern Chinese city Chengdu.
Police have also urged an uptick in security after the attack, including checks on guests at hotels and internet cafes.
During Xi’s tour of the region, he struck a hard line on terrorism while visiting mosques, schools, military bases and police squads, vowing a “strike-first” anti-terrorism strategy‚ “to deter enemies and inspire people”. He told local officials that the government will “resolutely stamp out the brazenness of the terrorists” while “holding high the banner of rule of law”, state media reported this weekend.
According to the state-run Global Times newspaper, Chinese authorities may expedite the passage of a new anti-terror law in the wake of the attack. The legislation will define what constitutes an act of terrorism and clarify the roles that different law enforcement agencies will play in anti-terror campaigns. Currently, authorities deal with terrorism cases under the country’s criminal law, which state media has called “sometimes inadequate”.
Li Wei, an anti-terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that the new law is likely to come out soon, perhaps this year. Details about the proposed law remain vague.
Xinjiang’s rate of violent attacks has risen sharply since October 2013, when a Uighur man drove an SUV into a marble bridge by Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, killing himself and four others. In March, knife-wielding Uighurs killed 29 people and injured more than 140 at a railway station in Kunming, the capital of south-west China’s Yunnan province.