China now says 50 people, not two, died in Xinjiang blasts

China’s state-run media now say 50 people, not two, died in a series of explosions over the weekend in far western Xinjiang province.

Provincial authorities initially said that Sunday’s explosions in Luntai county left two people dead and 100 injured. But late Thursday, the official New China News Agency issued a new account, reporting 40 “rioters” died, along with six civilians, two police officers and two auxiliary police officers. The area is known as Bugur in the Uighur language.

A majority of Xinjiang’s 22 million people are ethnic Uighurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking group. The region has been beset by a string of blasts, stabbings and clashes over the last year.

China has launched a crackdown in the region against what it says is a terrorist separatist movement influenced by overseas militants. But Uighur rights groups say much of the violence is the result of repressive policies on Uighur language and customs and discrimination that has left Uighurs economically disadvantaged compared with the Mandarin-speaking Han ethnic majority.

Independent verification of state-run media accounts of violence in Xinjiang is difficult because authorities harass foreign journalists who attempt to report in the region and frequently cut off Internet and phone services such as text messaging in areas that have been hit by large-scale violent attacks. Locals are reluctant to talk to foreign media for fear of reprisals from authorities.

In its new account of Sunday’s clashes, the news agency, quoting Xinjiang’s official Tianshan news portal, said that the blasts occurred at a shop, an open-air market and two police stations. Police described the explosions as an “organized and serious” terrorist attack and said 54 people were injured, including 32 Uighurs.

Radio Free Asia, which has a Uighur-language service, quoted a resident as saying that Uighurs in the area were disgruntled over mass forced evictions to make way for an influx of Han Chinese. RFA added that a village-level Communist Party official said a curfew had been imposed in the area, with schools and offices closed for several days.

The state-run news agency said police had shot dead the “main suspect,” whom it identified as Mamat Tursun. He had been “operating as an extremist since 2003,” authorities said, and had been employed as a construction worker, calling on other people to “join his terrorist group.”

The news agency added that Tursun had shown strong disdain for anything related to the Chinese government, including refusing to attend the funeral of his father, a civil servant, and rejecting an invitation to his brother’s wedding because he had obtained a marriage certificate issued by the government.

Authorities have indicated that such antigovernment sentiments have been on the rise in Xinjiang. Government-issued billboards across the province aimed at countering “violent separatism” encourage locals to report anyone who exhibits antigovernment behavior -- including tearing up official documents and ID cards -- offering rewards worth thousands of dollars.

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