China Executes Nine Over Xinjiang Riots
According to news reports, nine have been executed for their roles in the July 5th Xinjiang riots. From Edward Wong of New York Times:
Nine people have been executed for taking part in ethnic rioting that convulsed a western regional capital in July and left nearly 200 people dead, a state news agency reported Monday.
The report by the China News Service did not give any further details of the executions, except to say that the cases had all been reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court, a legally mandated step in death penalty cases in China. The report did not say when the executions occurred.
The ethnicity of those executed was unclear. The report simply called them “criminals.” The rioting that broke out in the regional capital, Urumqi, on July 5 was largely carried out by Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who mostly follow Sunni Islam and are the biggest ethnic group in the vast Central Asian border region of Xinjiang.
From Associated Press:
Judging by their names, at least two of those sentenced were Han Chinese, while the others appeared to be Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group that calls Xinjiang its homeland.
[...] Twenty people were indicted Monday on charges related to the deaths of 18 people, destruction of property and other crimes during the rioting, the China News Service added.
