What is the latest information you have on Riot that happened in Xinjiang region of China?
URUMQI: At least 140 people were killed and 828 others injured in riots that erupted in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on Sunday night, officials said Monday. Fifty-seven bodies were retrieved from the streets of Urumqi, while the other victims were confirmed dead in hospitals, said Liu Yaohua, the regional police chief, at a press conference. “Several hundred people” have been arrested in the attacks and police are still searching for about 90 other key suspects in the city, Liu said. “Police have tightened security in downtown Urumqi and at key institutions such as power and natural gas facilities, as well as TV stations, to prevent large-scale riots.” Checkpoints have also been set up in Urumqi’s key locations as well in the neighboring Changji and Turpan prefectures, to prevent any suspected rioters from fleeing, Liu said. Similarly, more than 100 officials from adjacent areas have been transferred to the regional capital to help interrogate the suspects accord
The official Xinhua news agency said rioters “illegally gathered in several downtown places and engaged in beating, smashing, looting and burning” in the regional capital Urumqi. The dead were “three ordinary people of the Han ethnic group,” Xinhua said. It did not say how they died. Nor did the official reports specify the ethnicity of those involved in the unrest or the reasons behind it, and calls to the Xinjiang government spokesperson’s office and Urumqi police were not answered. But other sources told Reuters the clash involved members of the Uighur ethnic minority, many of whom resent the Chinese presence in the region, and the cultural and religious controls imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party. Dilxat Raxit, an advocate of Uighur independence exiled in Sweden, said the unrest was sparked by anger over a confrontation between Han Chinese and Uighur factory workers in far southern China in late June, when two Uighurs died. “It began as a peaceful assembly. There were thousa
