China arrests 5 in Beijing terror attack
Chinese authorities announced the arrests of five men Wednesday in connection with this week’s audacious suicide car attack in the heart of China’s capital, calling it a planned terror attack — Beijing’s first in recent history — and identifying the attackers as members of a Muslim minority from China’s western Xinjiang region.
Police said the five suspects, described as Islamic jihadists, were detained the same day as the Monday crash at the Forbidden City gate across from Tiananmen Square, in the culturally and politically sensitive section of Beijing where China’s Communist Party leaders live and work.
Like the event itself, news of the arrests was played down in the Chinese media and most outlets carried only a brief statement from the official Xinhua news agency, reflecting in part the government’s skittishness over an incident that exposed security lapses at one of the most heavily guarded locations in the country.
A statement on the Beijing police microblog said the five arrested Wednesday orchestrated the attack and had enlisted a family of three to drive the vehicle across a crowded sidewalk and then ignite the car at the foot of the Tiananmen Gate.
Two tourists, including a Filipino woman, were killed by the vehicle as it sped down the sidewalk, and 38 people were injured, including three Filipino citizens and a Japanese man.
Knives, iron rods, gasoline and a flag imprinted with religious slogans were found in the vehicle, police said.
The perpetrators, who all died when their vehicle exploded beneath the portrait of Mao Zedong, have been identified as a man with an ethnic Uighur name, his wife and his mother. The five arrested also were identified with typically Uighur names.
The attack in one of the eastern population centers is “something that the Chinese authorities have been worried about for a long time,” said University of Michigan expert Philip Potter.
“Once this threshold has been crossed, it is a difficult thing to constrain,” Potter said, predicting tighter surveillance and scrutiny of Uighurs in eastern cities.
Uighurs are Muslim Turks native to the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang where extremists opposed to Chinese rule have been battling security forces for years.
The statement said the five detained had helped plan and execute the attack, and were caught 10 hours after it was carried out. It said they had been on the run and were tracked down with the help of police in Xinjiang and elsewhere. It didn’t say where they were captured, but said police had found jihadi flags and long knives inside their temporary lodgings.
“The initial understanding of the police is that the Oct. 28 incident is a case of a violent terrorist attack that was carefully planned, organized and plotted,” the statement said.
The attack appears to mark a new boldness on the part of militants inspired by radical Islam and follows a particularly bloody summer of clashes in Xinjiang, including an attack on a police station, that have left at least 56 people dead this year. The government typically calls the incidents terrorist attacks.
Uighur extremism is generally seen as fueled by heavy-handed Chinese rule in Xinjiang and discrimination against them by China’s ethnic Han majority who make up more than 91 percent of the country’s population. Many Uighurs say they face routine discrimination, irksome restrictions on their culture and Muslim religion, and economic disenfranchisement that has left them largely poor even as China’s economy booms.
