Curfew on Chinese Town Follows Worst Riots in Region in 50 Years

Authorities have imposed a curfew on a town in the restive northwestern Xinjiang region after young Muslims demanding independence in western China beat people to death and torched cars in the region’s worst rioting in nearly 50 years, officials and local residents said Monday.

Death toll reports from last week’s riots varied wildly--from four to nearly 300--and it was not possible to reconcile the figures.

Many others were wounded Wednesday and Thursday when about 1,000 Muslim separatists of the Uighur ethnic group rampaged through Yining, about 40 miles from the border of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, to protest Beijing’s rule.

Security forces arrested up to 500 people, some of whom were later released, a Yining police officer, reached by telephone from Beijing, said Monday.

The unrest was the latest in a series of incidents in the vast but sparsely populated territory where tensions have often flared between the ruling minority Han Chinese and the majority Uighurs, a Turkic people who had their own Republic of East Turkestan from 1944 to 1949, when China’s Communists seized power.

In recent months, there have been bombings by Muslim separatists and several assassinations of pro-Beijing religious figures and government officials. Access to the region is restricted, and journalists who have traveled there have been closely followed and monitored.

Xinjiang, covering one-sixth of China, has a population of 16.6 million, of whom 38% are ethnic Han Chinese, according to Chinese figures.

Chinese police said Monday that four to five people were killed in the violence in Yining. But a Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao, reported Monday that more than 10 Chinese were killed and their bodies set on fire. Pro-independence groups abroad gave much higher estimates.

Modan Mukhlisi, a spokesman for the United National Revolution Front, a Uighur separatist group based in Kazakhstan, said 30 Uighurs died.

Ismail Cengiz of the East Turkestan Immigrants Assn., a pro-independence Uighur group based in Istanbul, Turkey, said 200 Muslim rioters and about 100 Chinese soldiers were killed.

Cengiz said the riots started after Chinese security forces arrested a group of women reading prayers in a house last Tuesday, a Muslim holy night. Rioters then marched on a police station, he said.