The confrontation began after the guards detained 16 Chinese around noon inside a border post with the intention of returning them to the Chinese authorities, the reports said. Some of the detainees grabbed one or more AK-47 assault rifles from the guards and at some point began firing, the reports said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Friday night on its microblog that a violent episode had taken place on the Vietnamese border but did not give details.
An online report from Vietnam citing the state-run newspaper Tien Phong said hundreds of police officers and border guards surrounded the building during the standoff and urged the Chinese inside to surrender.
Some of the five Chinese who died committed suicide, while the others were shot dead by Vietnamese police officers and border guards, according to anEnglish-language report on the website of Thanh Nien Daily, which is published by the Vietnam National Youth Federation, an official organization. The report also said that three women in the group “armed themselves with knives.” Another report said that some or all of those who killed themselves did so by leaping from the multistory building.
The Chinese group consisted of 10 men, four women and two children. They were detained at the Bac Phong Sinh border crossing in Vietnam’s northern Quang Ninh Province, which borders Guangxi Province in China. Chinese border guards had informed the Vietnamese at 5:30 a.m. Friday that a group from China was trying to enter Vietnam illegally, the Thanh Nien Daily report said.
The newspaper’s website posted a photograph of Vietnamese guards standing beside the four women and two children. The women all wore scarves over their faces, a typical style of dress for some Muslim women in China, particularly in parts of the Xinjiang region, where ethnic Uighurs, who generally practice Sunni Islam, are a significant population. In the photograph, the faces of the two children are visible, and their features indicate they could be Uighurs.
In Xinjiang, Uighurs live mostly along a belt of oasis towns south of the immense Taklamakan Desert and in some western border areas. They complain of harassment and discrimination by the Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, and violent clashes between the two groups have increased, leading to fierce crackdowns on Uighurs by the Han-dominated security forces.
China says there are terrorist groups among the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Some Uighurs say extremism could take hold if Chinese officials continue with their harsh policies against the Uighurs.
Recent events in China have increased the Hans’ wariness of Uighurs. In March, a small group of people armed with knives killed at least 29 civilians and wounded nearly 150 others in a train station in Kunming, in southwestern China. Official Chinese news reports said the eight suspects detained by the authorities were believed to be from Xinjiang but did not identify them as Uighurs. Reports said the attackers were terrorists but did not explain the group’s political motives or background.
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An overland trek into Southeast Asian countries has been an increasingly common route of escape for Uighurs. In March, the Thai authorities detained three separate groups of more than 400 illegal migrants in Thailand initially believed to be Uighurs. The largest of the groups numbered about 220 and was detained in a rubber plantation in Thailand.
The migrants were believed to be trying to make their way to Malaysia and then to Turkey. Members of the group insisted that they were from Turkey. The Uighurs speak a Turkic language.
Human Rights Watch and other organizations have strongly urged the Thai government not to hand the migrants back to the Chinese authorities.
The Bangkok Post reported Wednesday that the number of those detained at the rubber plantation in Songkhla Province was 218, and that more than 40 percent of them had been identified as ethnic Uighur citizens of China by Chinese officials in Thailand. The article cited Zhang Yiming, a senior diplomat at the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok.
The Thai immigration police raided the plantation in March because they were looking for camps of Rohingya boat people, mostly Muslims, who have been fleeing to Thailand to escape deadly violence directed against them by Buddhists in Myanmar, where Rohingya have long lived but have no citizenship.
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