Two Uighurs have been executed for carrying out the deadly attack on a police station in Kashgar in the run-up to the Olympics. From Reuters:
Abdurahman Azat, 34, and Kurbanjan Hemit, 29, were found guilty of a “terrorist attack on a frontier city’s border police that left 17 dead,” Xinhua news agency said. The attack came despite tightened security ahead of the Summer Games last August.
Almost half of Xinjiang’s 20 million people are Uighur, a largely Muslim group with a culture and language close to other Turkic parts of central Asia. Many Uighurs resent controls imposed by Beijing and an inflow of Han Chinese migrants.
The attackers rammed a truck into dozens of police on a morning training run on August 4 in the oasis city of Kashgar, following up their attack with explosives, a home-made gun and knives, state-run media reported at the time.
Xinhua has details on how the execution was carried out:
The Intermediate People’s Court of Kashi Prefecture publicized the death penalties, approved by the Supreme People’s Court, before an audience of about 4,000 local officials and residents at a stadium in Kashi City prior to the executions.
