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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Post tags: hijack, terrorism, World Uyghur Congress, Xinjiang
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Those missing include a butcher, a car mechanic, a restaurant manager, a bus driver, a street fruit vendor, a chef, a student, a recent university graduate, a chef/musician, and a recent graduate of a forest design school. Only 19 of these families have allowed their names to be made public. All fear retaliation by the authorities.

It is likely that this group of families is just a small portion of those with disappeared relatives.

…

Wang Mingshan, the chief of the Urumqi Public Security Department, is reported to have said he had received 300 requests from families for help in locating relatives.

According to one family member, there are more than two hundred families in one county in Hotan prefecture alone with disappeared relatives. Many of these families have been afraid to come forward out of fear of retribution by the authorities. For many families, the financial burden of travelling to Urumqi and Beijing is considerable, nevertheless many have made repeated trips in their hunt for information.

Instead of assistance from the authorities, many family members describe years of threats, intimidation, and even detention for petitioning the authorities and searching for information. The families who came forward publicly with their stories in interviews with Radio Free Asia describe intensified surveillance, threats, and orders to stop speaking to overseas groups.

Amnesty’s director for the Asia-Pacific told Reuters that repression in Xinjiang is “particularly pronounced”. In a Wall Street Journal piece published on Monday, World Uyghur Congress head Rebiya Kadeer wrote that Xinjiang “has become a second Tibet” in the years since the protests:

There is cause for concern that the third anniversary of the Urumqi clashes will further cement China’s existing policies. In anticipation of protests, the Chinese authorities have already announced that the temporary residence permits enabling workers from the countryside to remain in Urumqi have been revoked. Every day there are fresh reports of Chinese police raids on Uighur schools and other religious and cultural institutions.

Just as Beijing persecutes Christians and Falun Gong followers, it has tried to eliminate the Islamic religion which the majority of Uighurs adhere to. Last month, a 12-year-old boy was killed at an Islamic school that Chinese authorities deemed illegal. To add insult to injury, China defends this discrimination as necessary to fight Islamic extremism.

Last year in early July, Beijing declared that the situation in Xinjiang was “good and stable.” A fortnight later, 14 people were killed in the town of Khotan after police opened fire on protesters. Since the root cause of Uighur anguish is China’s determination to control our region permanently, it follows that stability can only grow from the barrel of a gun.

For many years, I have campaigned for Uighur freedom. I have also worked to develop and advance Uighur society. Just before I was incarcerated in a Chinese prison for six years, my main project involved assisting Uighur women to run their own businesses, just as I had done. My experiences brought me to the conclusion that Uighurs will only taste democracy when the outside world understands that there is a moral and strategic imperative to curb China’s brutal reign.

Also this week, Chinese state media reported that two Uyghurs died in custodyafter they and four others allegedly attempted to hijack a plane bound for Urumqi on June 29. Read more about Xinjiang and the Uighur ethnic group, 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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Notice: The following persons are not welcome in this bar:
Japanese militarists and those who worship at the Yasukuni Shrine
Those involved in international terrorism
Followers of Chen Shui-bian’s Taiwan Independence Movement
Those selling, carrying, or using drugs
Those carrying anti-personnel weapons
Followers of the Dalai Lama’s East Turkestan separatist movement

The bar’s sign reads like a mash-up of Chinese propaganda and nationalism’s greatest hits. “Japanese militarists” harken back to Japan’s colonial era, from the late 1880s to the end of WWII. The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is dedicated to all those who have given their lives to the Emperor, including WWII dead. Because of the brutality of colonial Japan and the lack of a satisfactory apology, annual visits to the shrine by Japanese heads of state send China and other East and Southeast Asian countries into a fury.

Rebiya and Kadeer and the Dalai Lama.

Chen Shui-bian, the first non-KMT president of Taiwan, is one of the founders of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. He’s less involved these days, as he is serving a 19-year prison sentence for graft, money laundering and forgery.

The curious group of unwelcomes at the end of the list is a conflation of the Tibetan and Uighur human rights movements. “East Turkestan” refers to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, site of protests in 2009. Rebiya Kadeer, exiled president of the World Uyghur Congress, has been labelled the “Uyghur Dalai Lama” and blamed for the 2009 violence in the Chinese press. Neither the Dalai Lama nor Rebiya Kadeer publicly advocate secession from China.

The bar sign excited some Tencent Weibo users:

GuoShaoying: Is this an anti-traitor bar?
郭少英: 能开好，这不开了反汉奸酒吧吗？

PepperXiang-RealEmperor: Followers of the Dalai Lama’s East Turkestan separatist movement—the guy who wrote this must think he’s really smart, but he managed to make a fool of himself in one sentence. Why don’t educated people open bars?
青椒翔-真相帝: 以达赖为首的东突分子，以为自己挺有范，结果一句话就露怯了。为什么文化人就开不好酒吧呢

NoWindStillRain: Followers of Gaddafi’s Al-Qaeda
风停雨不止: 以卡扎菲为首的基地分子

ZhouXu: The Dalai Lama merged with the East Turkestan separatists? Now he’s involved in Xinjiang, too?
周序: 达赖现在兼并东突了？他还管新疆的事情？

XiangXiaokai: How can the East Turkestan separatists stand to be so insulted as to have the Dalai Lama called their leader?
项小凯: 东突情何以堪，居然委屈以达赖为首。

Read more about Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang from CDT.

Sign translated by Josh Rudolph.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Shui-bian, Dalai Lama, DPP, East Turkestan, Gaddafi, KMT, Rebiya Kadeer, Taiwan, Taiwan independence, tencent, Tibet, Uyghurs, weibo, World Uyghur Congress, Xinjiang, Yasukuni Shrine
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According to the indictment, the 61-year-old passed on information to two handlers about members of Uighur clubs and associations in Sweden, Norway, Germany and the United States.

His handlers consisted of a diplomat attached to the Chinese embassy in Stockholm and a Chinese journalist, both of whom were tasked by Chinese intelligence services with securing details in Sweden about the interpersonal relationships of Uighurs… According to the indictment, the suspect reported extensively on activity within the World Uyghur Congress (an umbrella organization for exiled Uighur groups), relayed notes taken during meetings with members of the Uighur community, and provided details of the local Uighur leaders’ levels of political access.

By befriending his targets and pretending to sympathize with them, he was also able to supply his handlers with details on the political asylum status of people of particular interest to the Chinese authorities, as well as information about their health, current whereabouts, travel patterns and telephone numbers.

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