The Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2014

SHANGHAI—Eight men were indicted Friday on charges tied to a fiery vehicle crash last year near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the first in a string of attacks that Beijing labeled as terrorism and put scrutiny on a Chinese region with a largely Muslim ethnic minority.

The eight men were charged with unspecified roles in the Oct. 28 attack—in which five people were killed—as well as organizing, leading and participating in a terrorist group and endangering public security with dangerous strategies, according to the official Xinhua news agency. It didn’t name them, though authorities had previously announced the arrest of eight men with names similar to those used by the Uighur ethnic minority as suspects in the case.

Xinhua said they would be tried in Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court, in the capital city of Xinjiang, the northwestern region of China where many ethic Uighurs live. The men weren’t reachable to comment.

The Tiananmen crash killed two tourists and three people in the vehicle. The incident, near the portrait of Mao Zedong, was considered at the time a rare instance of violence by ethnic-Uighur separatists outside Xinjiang, where many of the mostly Muslim Turkic group lives and where some are pushing for independence.

Witnesses and state media said that despite tight controls in that particularly sensitive part of Beijing, a sport-utility vehicle plowed for several hundred yards along a sidewalk, knocking down several pedestrians before hitting a guardrail and bursting into flames.

Police said the passengers—an ethnic Uighur man, his wife and mother—set the vehicle on fire, killing themselves.

Other attacks have followed, handing President Xi Jinping an unexpected terrorism challenge. They include a mass stabbing in the southern city Kunming almost three months ago and a May 20 attack with explosives in an Urumqi market that left 39 dead and almost 100 injured.

Uighur activists say the violence reflects Chinese economic and social policies in the region that they consider unfair. In recent days, China’s government has vowed to tackle income disparities in Xinjiang, including pledging that one member of each family there would be offered a job.

Yet, the core of the yearlong program announced by the Communist Party’s top leadership last week is a campaign in Xinjiang to harshly crack down on terrorism.

Top priority should be given to the fight against violent terrorist attacks and religious extremist forces, according to a Xinhua summary of a plan set last week by the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, a high decision-making body.

Afterward, the government announced raids on suspected terrorist cells in Xinjiang and the arrests of several alleged plotters. One police raid there last week netted 1.8 metric tons of unidentified explosive material and another turned up evidence of terror-related video production, authorities said.

One exile group, the Washington-based Uyghur American Association, criticized the campaign in a statement last week. It said, “an extended crackdown on Uyghurs will merely prolong a cycle of violence precipitated by repressive policies in the region.”

The group said antiterrorist activity has in the recent past led to the arrest of moderate Uighurs, including a Beijing economist named Ilham Tohti, who was detained in January in Beijing and sent to Xinjiang, where police say he was charged with using his classes to advocate violent protests. He can’t be reached to comment, but his family has said he is innocent.

In the wake of the attacks, authorities in Beijing and other Chinese municipalities have noticeably tightened security in public venues, including parks and subways.

Last week, a Communist Party organization in the capital, the Beijing Office of Social Management and Control, said it was distributing red armbands to 850,000 volunteers and another 100,000 people who an official described as informants. China’s government often organizes volunteers to provide a front-line security defense for major occasions, from the Beijing Olympics to other sporting events.

City authorities there also reiterated the availability of rewards announced in February to pay up to 40,000 yuan (about $6,500) for information that leads to terrorists.

A similar program got under way last month in Shanghai where hundreds of the thousands of volunteers were outfitted in yellow vests to keep watch at subway stops and offered rewards. The eastern coastal city is also spearheading new national regulations that allow more police officers to carry handguns, augmenting forces in militarylike vehicles parked on the city’s busier shopping streets.

High alert in China to the risks of religious-inspired terrorism appeared to help draw heavy online attention Saturday to a grisly murder in northeastern China, where police say six men bludgeoned a woman to death in a fast-food restaurant.

Patrons in the McDonald’s Corp. MCD +0.09% restaurant in Zhaoyuan, Shandong province, videoed and photographed the attack, which occurred Wednesday. McDonald’s didn’t respond to a request to comment.

China’s Ministry of Public Security on Saturday blamed the murder on “six religious extremists.” They linked the culprits to a group called “Almighty God,” which authorities had previously identified as a Christian-inspired cult determined to end Communist Party rule.

Police said men stabbed and hit the young woman during a recruiting drive after she refused their request to hand over her telephone number.

Police said five were detained and the sixth is a minor.

Write to James T. Areddy at [email protected]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/eight-indicted-for-crash-near-tiananmen-square-1401546292