China Vows ‘Iron Fist’ Response to Deadly Train Station Attack
March 2nd, 2014Via: Christian Science Monitor:
For more than a year, the Chinese media have published regular reports of deadly violent incidents in the predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang, in China’s far west.
More than 100 people died last year in clashes between the police and ethnic Uighurs identified by the government as terrorists seeking independence from Beijing.
Saturday night’s attack in the southwestern city of Kunming, however, which officials attributed to Xinjiang separatists, appears to have been of an entirely different order.
The assault by more than a dozen knife-wielding men and women who killed 29 people at the train station waiting to buy train tickets, and wounded 140 more, was the most violent episode ever involving Uighurs outside Xinjiang. It illustrates that despite heightened police surveillance of suspected Xinjiang terrorists, there is little the authorities can do to prevent attacks by determined opponents, as they cannot maintain the level of security across the country that they seek to impose in Xinjiang.
