Riot police patrolled a street in the regional capital in China's Xinjiang province on Monday. The Chinese state news agency reported that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in Urumqi, in far western China.
Photo: Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The rioting broke out Sunday afternoon in a large market area and lasted for several hours before riot police officers and paramilitary or military troops locked down the Uighur quarter of the city, according to witnesses and photographs of the riot.
At least 1,000 rioters took to the streets, stoning the police and setting vehicles on fire. A boy stood amid the burnt wreckage of a bus and shopping stalls in a street in Urumqi.
Photo: Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The riot was the largest ethnic clash in China since the Tibetan uprising of March 2008. Like the Tibetan unrest, it highlighted the deep-seated frustrations felt by some ethnic minorities in western China over the policies of the Communist Party.
Many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, resent rule by the Han Chinese, and Chinese security forces have tried to keep oil-rich Xinjiang under tight control since the 1990s, when cities there were struck by waves of protests, riots and bombings. Last summer, attacks on security forces took place in several cities in Xinjiang; the Chinese government blamed separatist groups.
This handout photo released from the Washington-based Uyghur American Association purportedly showed protesters clashing with the police Sunday in Xinjiang.
