China Acknowledges Killing 28 People; Accuses Them of Role in Mine Attack
BEIJING — The Chinese authorities acknowledged on Friday that they had killed 28 people suspected of taking part in an attack on a coal mine in the country’s turbulent western frontier, several days after news of the killings first emerged.Officials in Xinjiang, a sparsely populated swath of desert and mountains near China’s border with Kazakhstan, said the people were terrorists who had helped orchestrate anattack on a Chinese coal mine in September, which they said killed 16 people, according to a report by Tianshan, a state-run news website.
“All terrorists — no matter if they are from China or abroad, no matter what they do or where they hide — will be wiped out resolutely, completely and thoroughly,” the article said.
Violence has escalated in Xinjiang in recent years amid clashes between the government and Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority who are mostly Muslim and make up 40 percent of Xinjiang’s population. Chinese leaders have severely restricted freedoms for Uighurs amid concerns that some are using violence to achieve independence from China.
The details of the operation, which took place last week, were first revealed on Wednesday by Radio Free Asia, a news service financed by the United States government. The outlet reported that the Chinese authorities had killed 17 people in the raid, including several women and children.
China heavily censors information on Xinjiang, and the report by Tianshan on Friday provided few details about those who were killed, describing them as “thugs.”
But an image published by several Chinese news outlets showed a journal kept by one of the officers involved in the raid, in which the officer described hearing voices of women and children as the forces approached.
“There might be many people here, considering all the footprints,” the officer recalled in the journal.
In a section marked “conclusion,” the officer wrote, “Anybody who commits violence against the people and the government will pay the price in the face of the people’s police and the people’s military!”
The image was described on social media websites as coming from the Ministry of Public Security. It was later removed from many Chinese websites, as was a censored version of the image that blurred the detail about women and children.
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Xinjiang officials said those who were killed in the raid had taken part in an attack on a coal mine in September in Baicheng, not far from China’s border with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The attack, one of the deadliest acts of violence in the region in recent years, killed more than 50 people, according to interviews with victims’ relatives and residents in last month.
The report on Friday said that only 16 people, including five police officers, had died in the coal mine massacre. It was not immediately clear how Chinese officials had calculated that number.
The news report said that those who took part in the attack on the coal mine had collaborated with an “overseas radical organization,” though it did not provide specifics. The Chinese government has long accused the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an Islamic separatist group, of leading efforts to radicalize Uighurs, though human rights groups have challenged those claims.
“It is striking about how little information there is, and how much effort the government puts into preventing any kind of independent reporting,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director for Amnesty International in Hong Kong.
He added, “Everyone accepts that China has a terrorism problem. But it doesn’t mean that you have to accept uncritically all the assertions that the government makes with respect to terrorism.”
Chinese officials described the raid as a 56-day operation that benefited from the assistance of 10,000 Xinjiang residents, who formed a “dragnet from sky to the earth,” according to the story in Tianshan. The article included photos of the operation, several of them seemingly staged, depicting officers trudging through rivers and drying boots by a fire.
One person surrendered, the report said.
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