Shoppers, vendors fear for lives in chaos
Print Edition
AT least 31 people were killed and more than 90 injured yesterday when terrorists in two SUVs plowed through shoppers while setting off explosives on a busy street market in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Many of the victims were elderly people who frequented the morning market.
The attack in Urumqi, the regional capital, was the bloodiest in a series of violent terrorist incidents in the country. The Xinjiang regional government said the early morning attack was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”
The two vehicles crashed through barriers at 7:50am and drove into the crowds while setting off explosives, killing 31 people and injuring 94, it said in a statement.
The SUVs then crashed head-on and one of them exploded, Xinhua news agency reported. It quoted a witness as saying there were up to a dozen blasts in all.
The death toll was the highest for a violent incident in Xinjiang since riots in Urumqi in 2009 left nearly 200 people dead. It was also the bloodiest single terrorist violence in the region in recent history.
A vendor said the SUVs entered the street at high speed and just drove into people.
“Four senior citizens were run over and killed in front of me,” he told Xinhua.
A vegetable seller at the market near Renmin Park in downtown Urumqi said the two cars were weaving along the road.
“They went past my stall and an old man nearby was hit. I feared for my life,” he said.
A jogger told Xinhua the vehicles had flags on them with a white background and black characters that “looked like Uygur words.”
The boss of an aquatic shop, which lost its windows in the first blast, said one of the cars was forced to stop as it was blocked in by carts and people who’d been knocked down.
“Two minutes later, the car blew up,” he said.
Another business owner told Xinhua he heard a dozen loud explosions.
A supermarket manager told the news agency a lot of people rushed to hide inside her store. “They were screaming and crying. Some people had blood on them. It was horrible,” she said.
A man said he saw the aftermath of the blasts on his way to work. “The air was full of the smell of gunpowder and the sound of sobbing,” he told Reuters.
“There were simply too many (casualties), old folk who were at the morning market.”
Photos posted on social media purportedly of the blast showed a column of smoke and chaos at the market, with bloodied people lying on the tree-lined road near small stands selling fruit, vegetables and eggs.
“There were two vehicles that drove like crazy toward the morning market,” another witness told Reuters.
“The market was chaos ... it was definitely a terrorist act. I’m so angry”
Most shops on the nearby street remained closed yesterday, Xinhua said.
Urumqi was the scene of a bomb attack at a train station late last month that killed three people, including two attackers, and injured 79.
In response to yesterday’s attack, President Xi Jinping pledged to “severely punish terrorists, maintain a “strike first” policy and “crack down on them with a heavy fist,” CCTV said.
Xi ordered police to increase patrols and security controls at possible terrorist targets and prevent ripple effects.
He also urged local authorities to solve the case quickly, put the injured under proper care and offer condolences to the families of the victims.
Premier Li Keqiang called on authorities to step up safety measures and eliminate weak points in public security, to protect people and property, Xinhua reported.
Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun was dispatched to Urumqi as head of a team to investigate the incident.
The regional government has set up an emergency response system to treat the injured, all of whom were taken to hospital. The Xinjiang Regional People’s Hospital received 15 patients, two of them seriously injured. The youngest is 51 years old and the rest are all above 65, said Lei Wei, deputy head of the hospital’s medical administration department.
“The injured include people from both Han and Uygur ethnic groups,” said Liu Hongxia, head of the medical administration department of the regional traditional Chinese medicine hospital.
“Most of them are elderly people,” she said in tears. “I feel sad seeing them suffer.”
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the incident “lays bare again the anti-human, anti-social and anti-civilization nature of the violent terrorists and deserves the condemnation of the global community and the Chinese people.”
“The Chinese government has the confidence and the ability to combat the terrorists,” Hong told a daily news briefing. “These terrorists are swollen with arrogance. Their schemes will not succeed.”
In a posting on its Chinese-language microblog account, the United States Embassy said it offered its condolences to victims of the “violent attack,” but stopped short of labeling it terrorism.
In contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed condolences over the terrorist act in a telegram to President Xi, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Yesterday’s attack came just two days after courts in Xinjiang sentenced 39 people to prison after being convicted of crimes including organizing and leading terrorist groups, and inciting ethnic hatred.
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