China Central Television said Monday that another group of suspects had been captured and interrogated, though it didn’t say how many. It also said explosives were seized. The report quoted the state anti-terrorist office and Meng Hongwei, the vice public security minister.

Also Monday, CCTV broadcast images of a memorial service for the 12 men and three women police officers and officials killed in the clash. It said Meng attended, along with more than 1,000 people from local party and government departments.

A leading Uighur activist has questioned the official account of the incident. Local sources said that police sparked it by shooting a Uighur youth during an illegal search of homes, according to Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the German-based World Uyghur Congress.

Authorities previously said 10 of those killed on the government side were Uighurs, three were Han, and two were from the Mongolian ethnic group. It said two other Uighurs were hurt. The ethnicity of the assailants wasn’t given.

While the details of the attack are not clear, local residents have cast doubt on the government’s version of events that claims it was a terrorist attack. BBC reporter Damian Grammaticas traveled to the town of Selibuya where the attack occurred:

Rather than “terrorists”, local people told us the violence involved a local family who had had a long-standing dispute with officials.

The family, we were told, were very religious. Officials had, for a long time, been pressuring the men in the family to shave off their beards, and the women to stop wearing full veils covering everything but their eyes.

Local government regulations, we were told, stipulate that women must not wear full veils, and only men who are over 40 years old are allowed to grow beards.

We cannot identify those who talked to us, as they are at risk of official reprisals, but one person said “community workers asked the family not to have their women cover their faces”.

“They’d been telling them for a long time. They never agreed,” the person added.

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US State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell also urged that “due process protections” be given to all Chinese citizens, including ethnic Uighurs.

…

“We urge the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation of this incident,” Mr Ventrell said.

He asked China to provide Uighurs with all the protections “to which they are entitled not only under Chinese constitutional laws but the international human rights commitments as well”.

He also called on China to safeguard religious rights.

Chinese officials called out the U.S. on Thursday for refusing to condemn the attack, which the state-run Global Times had compared to the Boston Marathon bombing. From Reuters:

The U.S. refusal to condemn the attack showed double standards, considering that it had been the recent victim of a terrorist attack, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters.

“We simply oppose the U.S. reversing black and white, confusing right and wrong, and continually refusing to condemn violent terrorist incidents, and instead, making wild accusations about Chinese policy toward ethnic minorities,” she said.

“We hope the U.S. will turn a mirror on itself and all its own domestic problems instead of pointing fingers at other countries.”

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Among the dead in the Tuesday afternoon fighting were 15 police officers and local government officials, the Xinjiang government propaganda office said in a news release. It said six assailants were killed on the spot and another eight were captured alive.

“Initial investigations show this was a gang plotting to carry out terrorist acts and the case is now being further cracked open,” the release said.

A leading activist from the region’s indigenous Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group questioned the official account, saying local sources said that police sparked the incident by shooting a Uighur youth during an illegal search of homes.

CNN provided more details on the alleged terrorist activity:

[…] Hou Hanmin, spokesperson for the Xinjiang government […] told CNN that some of the captured assailants said under interrogation that they had watched videos “from overseas” that featured violence and acts of terrorism.

“Then they made those large, lethal knives and wanted to use them for Jihad,” she said, referring to the Arabic term meaning “struggle.”

“They had been training in their own house for several months. They were affected by extremism and hoped to commit themselves to Jihad.”

But Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin urged caution about claims that terrorism was involved. From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:

“China has made many unproven and questionable statements about terrorism in the region. That does not mean there isn’t anti-state violence happening there, but we should take with a lot of caution any claim of terrorism,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.

He added: “There are a lot of deaths and a dearth of explanation about them. Every time an incident has been investigated, it brings up elements that challenge profoundly the version put out by authorities.”

He noted that there were criminal gangs in Xinjiang that could not necessarily be linked to terrorism, and added: “Anything that is outside of state-controlled religion is viewed by the Chinese government as illegal religious activity – and anything viewed as illegal religious activity is in turn associated with terrorism.”

Bequelin added, on Twitter:

The 6 Xinjiang suspects are at v. high risk of torture. Police likely in need of “confessions” to back murky claims of terrorism.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) April 24, 2013

Commentators in the U.S., meanwhile, have been embroiled in their own disputes over the terrorism label following last week’s Boston Marathon bombing and the dramatic ensuing manhunt. For Zhu Zhangping at China’s Global Times, the attack’s Chechen connection highlighted America’s “double standards on terror”:

[…] For the US, the sole power enjoying global leadership, it faces terrorism threats from overseas and it fights against terrorism actually only for the sake of its own and its allies’ safety.

As to Chechen separatists and Eastern Turkistan activists, the big headaches for Russia and China respectively, the US always takes two approaches.

On the one hand, the US defined some Chechen separatists as terrorist entities. On the other hand, the US often blamed the Russian government’s violation of ethnic groups’ human rights.

[…] The US does the same to the Xinjiang separatists. The US has only put the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, one of about 50 Eastern Turkistan groups, on its terrorist list. [AP's Christopher Bodeen notes that ETIM was "later quietly removed […] amid doubts that it existed in any organized manner.“] On the other hand, it praises separatist head Rebiya Kadeer as a “prominent human rights advocate” and finances her group. Such double standards are often interpreted as making trouble to contain China’s rise, while hitting the most dangerous group that is most closely linked to Al Qaeda.

[…] Before it can trace any hints that the Xinjiang separatists may attack the US, the US will not easily abandon these troublemakers in its attempts to slow China’s rapid development and expanding power projection.

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[...]Yesterday [Tuesday] evening, the Chinese Consulate finally confirmed the identity of the third fatality: a Chinese national in her mid-twenties, who was attending graduate school at Boston University and majoring in statistics.

[...]Lu Lingzi was a native of Shenyang, a city in northeastern China about a hundred miles from the North Korean border. She attended Shenyang Northeastern High School, from which she graduated in 2008. She did well enough there to land a spot at the Beijing Institute of Technology, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in international economics. In Boston, she had hoped to obtain her master’s.

On Monday afternoon, Lu joined the marathon-watchers with two other overseas Chinese friends, partaking in one of their first and more cacophonous of American traditions. Exploration seemed like a welcome pastime. On her Weibo photo album, Lu had already posted some of her favorite foreign forays: blueberry waffles, Godiva dark chocolate, a CD cover of an Itzhak Perlman violin concerto.

Near the finish line, the three girls may have stopped, craning their necks, immobile in a sea of flush, anxious faces. The sheer energy and anticipation, not two months after the Chinese Spring Festival, might have even reminded the recent émigrés of another holiday season, celebrated an ocean away.[...]

Fox News has more on Lü’s early life, family background, and educational career, noting her outstanding academic performance and social involvement while at BU:

Back home in the Chinese city of Shenyang — where residents are still bundled in heavy coats to fend off chilly temperatures and strong winds — Lu’s family home is an apartment on the grounds of a Communist Party training academy where her grandfather was a professor, neighbors said.

[...]Lu went to a nearby primary school before being admitted to a highly selective experimental public facility, Northeast Yucai School, where she studied from seventh through 12th grade. About 100 of the 600 graduates annually go to study abroad in countries including Australia, Singapore, Japan, France, Britain and the United States, and the rest usually go to top universities, often in Beijing. Local media say Lu scored the second highest in her class to go to Beijing Institute of Technology.

“It is such a pity. She was an excellent student and she got a chance to study abroad but didn’t finish her study,” Shenyang resident Zhang Zhuang said in an interview. “It is such a sad story. Her parents must be heartbroken.”

Lü’s parents, who were issued U.S. visas today, are indeed heartbroken by the tragic loss of their only daughter, as can be seen in a public statement that they released on the Boston University website. In a report connecting Lü’s story to ongoing policy-related news topics, the Wall Street Journal suggests that the one-child policy, and the solidarity of a nation living under it, may explain why the sentiment surrounding Lü’s death is resonating so far in China:

Mr. Lu’s death resonates with many in China because of its one-child policy, which was implemented in 1980 to slow China’s soaring population growth. As a result, many households put their hopes, dreams and fears behind their only child. Said one post on China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service widely repeated online: “An only child is the lifeblood of a family!”

Many parents rely on their children for care-taking and social security as they age, making losses such as Ms. Lu’s often painful both emotionally and economically, said Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

“With losses of only children, highlighted by cases like this, and those from other kinds of attention-getting tragedies, hundreds of millions of Chinese parents with only one child inevitably think about what they would do should such an utterly unfortunate thing happen to them,” Mr. Wang said.

As Chinese netizens light digital candles remembering a lost compatriot, Boston residents are mourning the unexpected atrocity. At an interfaith memorial service in Boston yesterday, President Barack Obama expressed the collective grief of the United States. In his speech, he extended his condolences directly to the Lü family, and to  all those affected by the bombing. From the New York Times:

Our prayers are with the Lu family of China, who sent their daughter, Lingzi, to BU so that she could experience all this city has to offer. She was a 23-year-old student, far from home. And in the heartache of her family and friends on both sides of a great ocean, we’re reminded of the humanity that we all share.

BU Today reports that a memorial scholarship fund will be established in Lü’s name:

“It’s a fitting tribute and the right thing to do,” says Kenneth Feld (SMG’70), a BU trustee who proposed the memorial scholarship Wednesday at a meeting of the executive committee of the Campaign for BU, which he chairs. Before the meeting adjourned, its seven members had committed $560,000 to the fund, created in accordance with the preferences of the LU family, who will be traveling to Boston this week from their home in Shenyang, China.

[...]“The scholarship fund will welcome all contributions, says Feld. “Every one has real meaning.”

For more on Lü Lingzi’s death at the Boston Marathon and how the Chinese microblog community reacted to it, see prior CDT coverage, or click through to read the full stories quoted above.

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Tuesday evening, the third victim was identified as a Boston University graduate student from China who was watching the race with two friends near the finish line.

The Chinese Consulate in New York confirmed the student’s death, the Associated Press reported Tuesday night.

The university did not release the student’s name or gender, pending family approval. But the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that relatives have requested that the student not be identified.

One friend was injured and listed in stable condition at a Boston hospital. The other friend was not hurt.

Bloomberg has more on the condition of Zhou Danling, who is reportedly recovering after two surgeries.

The Australian reports on the outpouring of grief on weibo over news of the Chinese victims:

“Terrorism has no national limits, the victims have no national limits. Together we condemn, together we mourn,” one user of Sina Weibo, a social networking site similar to Twitter, wrote.

“Poor child, go peacefully,” wrote another.

The consulate said relatives had requested that the deceased not be identified.

But Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television named the victim as well as a friend, Zhou Danling, whom it said was injured, adding that both were watching the race.

Even before news was released about the victims, the bombing was a major topic on weibo, following live on-the-scene updates from Chinese runners and observers, including real estate mogul Wang Shi. Many messages expressed compassion and concern for the victims and admiration for the American response to the violence. From Bloomberg:

The Chinese reaction had the potential to turn political. In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, many Chinese publicly celebrated them as a justified humiliation of a bully, and the memory of that bitter outpouring remains a source of embarrassment. Fortunately, the Boston attack, far from inflaming the deep antipathy that many Chinese feel for U.S. foreign policy, appears to have inspired a widespread outpouring of empathy. “As Chinese, we are praying for you,” tweeted a Beijing-based graduate of Bentley College. “I almost went to the marathon,” a music student wrote. “Here’s wishing peace to all of the students in Boston.” Sister Ran Xiang, the handle for a popular microblogger in Guangzhou, wrote:

“Years ago, the whole of China applauded 911. Now in the wake of the Boston Bombings, we see a lot of sympathy and condemnation. A moment of silence for the dead and wounded and a prayer for the continued recovery of China’s humanity.”

Other messages on weibo drew comparisons to September 11 as well. From the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time:

To be sure, some responses were unsympathetic or even openly hostile, and a handful of microbloggers tempered their sympathy for innocent people injured in the Boston blast by saying greater numbers of innocent people have been killed as a result of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, the dominant refrain was mournful — – a notable departure from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, which were openly celebrated by many in China.

“When 9-11 happened, I also cheered. Now I feel ashamed for the foolishness of my 20-year-old self,” wrote one microblogger.

Microbloggers also compared the reaction in the U.S. to what it might have been in China to a similar incident. From the Washington Post:

Chinese Web users seemed to draw two general conclusions: that China would be more effective at preventing a Boston-style attack, but that the U.S. is better equipped to respond to and cope such an event. They portrayed China as a formidable security state that privileges safety and secrecy, but the U.S. as a place where officials, police and citizens work together in harmony and cooperation.

It’s a somewhat rosy perspective of the U.S., one discussed jealously, even reverently. Many Chinese commenters seemed to treat this American trade-off – less security for greater transparency – as not only preferable but something from which their own country should learn.

“I’m not saying that the US is much better than China,” one Weibo user wrote in a comment aggregated by the site Offbeat China. “But in the face of a bombing attack, they have absolute information transparency and absolute freedom of speech. There is no ban on reporting or block of information. All media are allowed to report, which will never happen in our country.”

China Daily has also translated microblog reactions to the bombing.

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The courts in Kashgar and Bayingol said the 20 – all ethnic Uighurs judging by their names – had had their “thoughts poisoned by religious extremism”, and used cell phones and DVDs “to spread Muslim religious propaganda”, the Xinjiang government said on its official news website (www.ts.cn).

Some of them bought weapons to kill policemen as part of their jihad and spread propaganda related to the banned East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the report said, a group which China says wages a violent campaign for a separate state.

…

Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress, said the 20 were actually guilty of no more than listening to the U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia and using the internet to discuss the importance of religious and cultural freedom.

The news comes amid heightened tension in the province, as one or more Uyghurs allegedly carried out an attack on Han Chinese in Korla earlier this month. Chris Buckley of The New York Times has more on today’s rulings in Kashgar and Bayingol:

The Chinese-language report did not describe the ethnicity of the people convicted or their genders. But their distinctive names and the separatist accusations left little doubt that they are Uighur, a mainly Muslim ethnic group with a Turkic language and culture that sets them apart from China’s Han majority. And details in the report offered a picture of volatile resentment among Uighur men drawn to militancy spread over the Internet.

…

“It’s not clear what is being alleged against these people beyond being members of a clandestine organization,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group with headquarters in New York.

“China has for a long time conflated religious activities taking place outside of state control with extremism,” said Mr. Bequelin, who closely follows developments in Xinjiang. “There’s been so many unsupported accusations by the Chinese government about extremist Islamic activities and terrorist activities in Xinjiang that it makes its difficult to have faith in these kinds of announcements.”

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The Intermediate People’s Court in Hotan Prefecture ruled at the first instance that the men were guilty of organizing, leading or participating in a terrorist group, hijacking the aircraft and attempting to detonate explosives on the aircraft.

Musa Yvsup and Arxidikali Yimin, the leaders of the group who plotted the hijacking, and Eyumer Yimin, a major participant in the planning, were sentenced to death, according to a statement from the court.

Alem Musa, who played a minor role in the plane hijacking and willingly pleaded guilty after being arrested, received a life sentence, said the statement.

All the defendants confessed the above crimes at the court.

Tensions in Xinjiang Autonomous Region have been mounting since 2009. According to AFP, the attempted hijacking also resulted in an ‘economic loss’:

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The killings bring to four the number of Chinese workers killed in the last month in Borno, after gunmen suspected of being robbers killed two construction workers in October.

Radical Islamist sect Boko Haram has killed hundreds in bomb and gun attacks in Borno state since it launched an uprising there in 2009, mostly targeting figures of authority.

“At about 8 a.m. (Wednesday) some gunmen shot and killed two Chinese construction workers at Benisheik in Kaga local government of Borno state,” Police Commissioner Abdullahi Yuguda told Reuters.

Boko Haram’s insurgency has contributed to a breakdown in order across the north of Africa’s most populous nation and security sources believe criminal gangs carry out deadly armed robberies knowing Boko Haram is likely to be blamed.

While Boko Haram’s attacks have killed hundreds in the region, the identity of the killers of the two Chinese workers is still unknown, according to the BBC:

The BBC’s Bashir Abdullahi in the capital, Abuja, says the general insecurity has also allowed robbers to take advantage of the situation – using the militants as a guise.

Chinese workers are involved in many construction works across the north – most of them funded by the Chinese government.

According to an official at the Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, four engineers had just arrived in Benisheikh from Damaturu in neighbouring Yobe state.

“Some unknown gunmen trailed them to the yard and opened fire, killing two Chinese engineers,” the official told the AFP news agency.

As Africa’s Chinese diaspora faces more pressure, China is urging Nigeria to ensure the safety of Chinese nationals, from China Daily:

“The Foreign Ministry has instructed the Chinese embassy in Nigeria to deal with the incident immediately. The embassy lodged representations with the Nigerian side,” spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily news briefing.

The embassy also urged the Nigerian government to take concrete measures to ensure the safety of Chinese nationals in the country, Hong said.

The attack was the third involving Chinese working in Nigeria in the last month. A cook working for a Chinese construction company was killed in the city of Maiduguri in north Nigeria’s state of Borno on Oct 8.

A Chinese construction worker was shot dead in the same city on Oct 19.

Read more about China’s investment in Africa, via CDT.

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The Global Times said the men, from the Uighur minority group, died in hospital of injuries sustained trying to break into the plane’s cockpit.

Six people were detained after the incident on Friday, in which several people were injured.

The Global Times, citing unnamed officials, said the men had died “from injuries received in a fight with passengers and crew”.

The Tianjin Airlines plane had just taken off from Hotan and was bound for Urumqi when the incident occurred.

Furthermore, authorities are claiming that the two men were staging a terrorist attack, the Irish Times adds:

TWO MEN who allegedly tried to hijack a plane in far west China by battering the cockpit door with a crutch and trying to set off what were suspected to be explosives have died from injuries sustained in a fight with passengers and crew.

An overseas rights group said the incident was not a hijacking attempt but a fight over a disputed seat, but Chinese authorities insisted it was a terror attack.

“It is a serious and violent terrorist attack by means of hijacking an airplane,” ran a report on the official website for the Xinjiang region, Tianshan.

The Global Times newspaper reported that six members of the Uighur ethnic group used crutches and “held items suspected to be explosives” to break into the cockpit 10 minutes after the Tianjin Airlines flight carrying 92 passengers and nine crew members took off from Hotan to the Xinjiang capital Urumqi.

According to the Shanghai Daily, the passengers and crew would receive a monetary reward for their bravery aboard the flight:

Six police officers, five of them from the Uygur ethnic minority, were on Tianjin Airlines’ flight GS7554, the unidentified official, said to be commander of operations on the ground, told the newspaper.

The official said Liu Huijun, a passenger sitting next to the cockpit in the first-class section, was one of the first people to figure out that the hijacking was under way and he shouted out a warning to other passengers. Liu knocked an explosive device out of the hands of a hijacker but he was hit on the head.

The Xinjiang government said yesterday that each of the 10 people, including police officers, flight attendants and passengers who helped fight the hijackers, would receive a 100,000 yuan (US$15,751) reward for their bravery.

The cabin crew would also share a 500,000 yuan reward.

Tensions between Han and Uighur ethnic groups have been high in Xinjiang in recent years. Uighur rights groups to claim that the attack was actually due to a seat dispute, The Telegraph reports:

Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the German-based World Uyghur Congress which campaigns for Uighurs’ rights, said Friday that it wasn’t a hijacking attempt but an in-flight brawl over a seat dispute.

Friday’s incident occurred just a few days before the anniversary of the July 2009 riots in Urumqi when nearly 200 people were killed in fighting between Han Chinese and Uighurs.

Tensions are already high in Hotan, where authorities raided a religious school recently and are conducting home searches, according to the Washington-based Uighur American Association.

Netizens and microbloggers have also commented on the incident, and some have claimed to have had friends on the flight. From The Guardian:

Microblog accounts from people who claim they had friends on the flights said passengers helped to overcome the men and tie them up.

One microblogger told AP: “They had a long crutch that can be broken into pieces, and the pieces had sharp ends.”

In another account, a businessman said the head of Xinjiang’s grain bureau told him that its vice director, known only as Mr Liu, had been on board and had extinguished the fuse of a homemade explosive device.

Read more about Xinjiang and the Uighur ethnic group, via CDT.

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The man’s name — Abudukeremu Mamuti in Chinese — suggested he was from the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that populates the northwestern region and has long complained of political and religious oppression under Chinese rule.

According to a statement posted on an official Xinjiang judicial website, the defendant started preaching “religious extremism” last year and recruited people to form a “terrorist group”.

Then on February 28, he gathered all members at his home, armed them with knives and hatchets and took them to the market in Yecheng town — which belongs to the wider Kashgar prefecture — the statement said late Monday.

There, they killed 13 people on the spot and injured 16 others — two of whom later died of their injuries. Mamuti was detained on the scene and seven other attackers were shot dead. One other suspect also later died.

Since 2009, security has been high in the region due to ethnic tensions between Uighur and Han communities. Reuters reports on the location of Xinjiang in a region where China, India and Pakistan all have strategic interests:

China is extremely sensitive to Western suggestions that it mistreats or puts restrictions on Uighurs. Beijing often blames what it calls violent separatist groups in Xinjiang for attacks on police or other government targets, saying they work with al Qaeda or militants in ex-Soviet Central Asia to bring about an independent state called East Turkestan.

Some Chinese officials have also blamed attacks on Muslim militants trained in Pakistan. Yecheng, also known by its Uighur name of Kargilik, is close to the disputed region of Kashmir, ruled in part by India and Pakistan.

But exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say China overstates the threat posed by militants in Xinjiang.

The Chinese foreign ministry said the Yecheng incident should not be overblown and that it firmly opposes “a small group of violent terrorists and separatists destroying” the region’s peaceful development.

According to the BBC, China is blaming groups that are linked to al-Qaeda for the violence, but exiled Muslim Uighur community and human rights activists claim that this is an overstatement of the threats in Xinjiang.

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Some initial reactions from Twitter:

CPL reflects balance of power in pol institutions: Security apparatus did not get everything they wanted, but still increase their powers.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) March 14, 2012

(See ‘Legalizing the Tools of Repression‘ for context.)

The threat of up to six months of incommunicado detention in a police ‘guesthouse’ now hangs over the head of every government critic. Grim.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) March 14, 2012

当不义写进法律，则反抗就成为义务。

— 北风（温云超） (@wenyunchao) March 14, 2012

Wen Yunchao: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”

包括秘捕条款在内许多侵犯人权行为的刑诉法，最终以赞成2639 反对160 弃权57获得通过。这些短视的橡皮图章共同构筑的疯狂，会被经济不景气这个即将到来的大浪掀得东倒西歪。再严苛的管控，都无法解决制度不良造成的就业形势艰难、贫富差距加大、通货膨胀攀升等要命大难题

— 冉云飞 (@ranyunfei) March 14, 2012

Ran Yunfei: “The Criminal Procedure Law, whose secret detention provisions contain numerous infringements of human rights, has finally passed with 2,639 votes for, 160 against, and 57 abstentions. The madness that these short sighted rubber-stampers have built together will be wrecked by the coming wave of economic recession. The perilously great problems that have arisen from systemic failures—poor employment prospects, an expanding gap between rich and poor, rising inflation, and so on—cannot be resolved by means of ever-harsher controls.”

历史上最长的年头是1984，苏联在1984徘徊了74个春夏秋冬。我共朝的1984也已持续63个四季。“严冬已经来临，春天还会远吗？”

— Hu Jia 胡佳 (@hu_jia) March 14, 2012

Hu Jia: “The longest year in history is 1984. In the Soviet Union, 1984 dragged on for 74 springs, summers, autumns and winters. Under our current dynasty, it’s already lasted 63 years. ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ [the closing line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind']“

For more on the amendment, see CDT’s previous coverage: most recently, ‘Does China’s New Detention Law Matter?‘, ‘Al Jazeera: Inside China’s “Black Jails”‘ and ‘Chatting with China’s Security Apparatus‘.

See also some satirical cartoons on the subject: ‘Article 73 in an Iron House‘, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…’ by Hexie Farm for CDT, and another at Hexie Farm’s own site.

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The claim of responsibility is likely to alarm both the Pakistani government and China, which is a close of ally of Pakistan and has considerable investment in its south Asian neighbour.

The Chinese woman was shot on Tuesday in a market in the northwestern city of Peshawar along with a Pakistani man. Police at the time said they did not know the motive.

“Our comrades carried out the attack in Peshawar which killed the Chinese tourist,” Mohammed Afridi, a spokesman for a faction of the Pakistani Taliban from the Darra Adam Khel area, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“This was revenge for the Chinese government killing our Muslim brothers in their Xinjiang province.”

In recent years there have been a number of violent incidents between Uighurs and Hans in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. Most recently, a riot in Yecheng, Xinjiang left up to 20 dead. Read more about Uighurs and Xinjiang via CDT.

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The draft revision contains some significant encouraging changes. People suspected of ordinary crimes will be entitled to new rights, including prompt access to a lawyer and protection against coerced self-incrimination. There is also the right to have witnesses testify in court and be subject to cross-examination, to have police interrogations electronically recorded in some serious cases and to exclude from evidence confessions obtained by torture. Implementing these new rights will be challenging, but they signal a commitment to reaching China’s oft-stated goals of ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it signed in 1998, and establishing the rule of law.

Despite its positive aspects, the draft revision also embraces a more sinister agenda toward political outsiders. It will authorize, under Article 73, the practice of enforced disappearances of political offenders. While the practice has been employed for years, it was always technically illegal—until now. Under the draft, citizens can be secretly detained for up to six months on suspicion of “endangering national security” or “terrorism”—notoriously vague charges that have long been manipulated by police, prosecutors and courts. Article 73 is a blatant, open-ended attempt to authorize expanded political repression in the guise of concern for national security.

See more on the proposed Criminal Procedure Law changes, including reactions from Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: criminal procedure law, house arrest, illegal detentions, Jerome cohen, legal reform, legal rights, legal system, national security, terrorism
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In his report on the bill to the legislature, Vice Minister of Public Security Yang Huanning said the lack of clear definitions under current law have had direct, adverse effects on China’s effort to fight terrorism and bring terrorism-related assets under control, as well as to participate in international cooperation in this regard.

In the draft bill, terrorist acts are defined as those acts which are intended to induce public fear or to coerce state organs or international organizations by means of violence, sabotage, threats or other tactics.

The Beijing government has equated protests in Xinjiang and Tibet with terrorism, and this legal change is seen as an effort to bring terrorist suspects under legal charges. BBC adds:

Proponents of the new draft bill say it should make it easier to bring terrorism charges.

But critics say it is the Chinese government’s economic policies and restrictions on cultural and religious expression which are fostering anger among Xinjiang locals.

Last week, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that the Dalai Lama’s prayers for the nine Tibetans who had self-immolated in Sichuan were in fact, “terrorism in disguise.”

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: terrorism, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
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Police detained the 27-year-old woman passenger after she threatened to detonate a bomb during the China United Airlines flight from Beijing to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, Xinhua reported.

The plane, which was carrying 160 passengers and 10 crew and made an emergency landing at Gansu’s Jiayuguan Airport, left again six hours later after no explosives were found.

“A woman threatened the plane staff, saying ‘many people will die, there is TNT on the plane’,” Xinhua quoted the Jiayuguan head of public security, Chang Shaoyuan, as saying.

The woman, surnamed Wang and from the southwest mega-city of Chongqing, told police she had a problem with her boyfriend and was flying to Xinjiang to talk to him, the report said.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: crime, terrorism, Xinjiang
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