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Police detain 26 in Shantou City for inciting riots
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POLICE in Shantou City, south China’s Guangdong Province, have detained 26 people for inciting local villagers to break into the city government building that led to clashes with police guards and government officials last Friday, the local government said yesterday.
The instigation by the detainees was in apparent retaliation for their arrest over gambling.
The leader of the rioters, surnamed Lin, confessed to provoking the villagers, using the construction of a waste landfill in the city’s Jinping District as an excuse to protest, during which the villagers rushed into the government building while also disrupting traffic, Shantou government told a press conference yesterday.
“The rioters organized many unsuspecting villagers to break two fences, block the city government building for several hours and injured many officials and policemen,” Vice Mayor Qiu Wei, who is also the Party chief of the Shantou police bureau, told reporters.
Lin and other riot leaders organized a similar protest on the evening of July 7 to incite villagers of the Liantang area to block traffic and attack law enforcement officials after police cracked down on gambling and arrested several gamblers earlier in the day, Qiu said.
In the previous incident, the rioters held a police officer hostage for 13 hours and threatened to burn him alive while 30 police officers were injured and 11 police vehicles damaged. The protesters also blocked the 206 national expressway for three hours.
The same group of rioters were at it again last Friday morning, fearing punishment for the previous incident as well as to retaliate against the government, Qiu added.
He said police maintained their restraint at the beginning of the protest while government officials kept urging the unsuspecting public to leave but to no avail. The vice mayor did not reveal the total number of villagers who took part in the riots.
To avoid causing bigger damage, police took away the riot leaders by force and dispersed the public.
They then launched a search and educational campaign in the area on Saturday, confiscating more than 200 knives and sticks. Another 17 protest planners were also caught, police said.
“The riot organizers and participants have violated the country’s Criminal Law,” Qiu said, adding that police have urged those who participated in the incident to surrender in return for a lighter punishment.
“I will never take part in such protests again because they are illegal; those who took part in the riot should give themselves up,” Lin told Shantou television station.
Other riot leaders also expressed their regrets on TV and called on those at large to surrender.
Meanwhile, the city’s Longhu District police caught a resident surnamed Li and punished him with 10 days in detention for spreading rumors about the riots on the Weibo microblog.
Li wrote: “I witnessed Shantou police striking a resident to death while thousands of armed police were attacking the citizens.”
He has confessed to making false claims, police said.
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