BEIJING — Li Jinmei sat with her mother in the square outside Kunming
railway station Saturday night as Li's husband took their 6-year-old
daughter to buy train tickets. After the Lunar New Year break, the
family was returning to another city in southwest China, where his
welding job doesn't pay much but still more than farming their small
plot.
Then terror descended.
"Suddenly I saw everybody was running and screaming, so I followed them too," said Li, 32. More than 10 men and women, some dressed in black and masked, all bearing knives, had begun slashing and stabbing anyone they could reach, including children.
Close to the ticket hall, Li's husband, Pan Huabing, saw an attacker launch a blow at his daughter and threw himself in its path. Cut badly on the throat, he clutched his unharmed daughter on the ground. As another assailant approached, Pan's friend Zuo Ruxing, a fellow welder, grabbed the girl and his own son, also 6, and ran for their lives, he told The Beijing News.
At a nearby hotel, a desperate Li later found them. Police ended the carnage by shooting dead four of the suspected attackers, including one woman, said state broadcaster CCTV Sunday. The one assailant taken alive, wounded by police fire, was also female. Police were searching for at least five more.
At least 29 people were killed and 143 wounded. according to Xinhua News Agency. The incident ranks as one of China's worst and most deadly acts of terror, according to city authorities. Xinhua cited them saying evidence shows the attack was by "Xinjiang separatist forces" who seek independence for the vast region of Xinjiang in China's northwest. It is home to 10 million Uighur, a mostly Muslim people.
As Kunming residents struggled to come to terms with the bloodshed visited upon their usually peaceful city, a popular holiday destination in China, many relatives faced anxious waits for the wounded and missing.
"Thanks to Mr. Zuo, and my husband, my daughter could keep her life," a grateful Li Jinmei said by telephone from her husband's hospital, one of 11 treating the injured.
But after seven hours of surgery, "doctors said he isn't out of danger. He's still in an ICU," said Li, who worries about the mental impact of the horror their daughter witnessed. "I'm a housewife. I've never heard of Uighurs before. I only know we have no enmity against them, but how could they be so cruel?" she said. "I can't understand why they would do that to my child and my husband."
Chinese authorities, issuing the same judgment given to several recent assaults on police stations in Xinjiang, said Saturday's incident was "a premeditated, organized, serious, violent terrorist attack" by Xinjiang separatists. Beijing blames outside forces and religious extremists for fomenting trouble between the Uighur and the Han, China's majority ethnic group, who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades.
Uighur activist groups accuse Chinese authorities of causing unrest through repressive, discriminatory policies. The U.S. State Department said last week there was "severe official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, association and assembly of ethnic Uighurs" in Xinjiang in 2013.
Adding to calls for swift action from China's Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, the domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu, who had rushed to Kunming, said "the terrorists were devoid of conscience, brutally attacked unarmed civilians, exposed their anti-humanity and anti-society nature, and they should be harshly punished in accordance with the law," Xinhua reported.
A commentary carried by Xinhua on Sunday titled "Nothing justifies civilian slaughter in China's "9-11'" argued that China's recent decision to establish a national security committee chaired by Xi is "very timely and necessary." After Saturday, "a nationwide outrage has been stirred. Justice needs to be done and terrorists should be punished," the commentary said.
Most previous incidents of Xinjiang-related violence have been limited to Xinjiang. Saturday's attack in Yunnan province, more than 1,000 miles to the southeast, follows another in Beijing last October, when a Uighur family of three drove a car into Tiananmen Gate and detonated it, killing themselves and two pedestrians and injuring 40 people.
This second incident "will be quite worrying for Beijing, as it shows the spread of the sphere of activity to the Chinese heartland, and a few steps along in developing their strategy by a separatist or terrorist organization," said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang and terrorism at Australia's Griffith University.
Although Beijing insists that Xinjiang terror attacks are inspired from abroad, Saturday's assault, like many in recent years, still reveals "a low level of sophistication, being armed with knives, not the sophisticated, well-armed terror attack of the al-Qaeda variety," Clarke said.
Chinese state policy "is partly responsible for what we're seeing," he said, because of Uighur anger at crackdowns on Islamic practice, and other ways of controlling Uighur culture, and the perception that Xinjiang is being colonized by Han immigrants.
"Severe discrimination and repressive policies lead to Uighur people being wounded in their hearts, and may provoke the victims to adopt these kind of extreme measures," Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman in Sweden for the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group, said in a written statement. He said there was no justification for attacks on common people.
Then terror descended.
"Suddenly I saw everybody was running and screaming, so I followed them too," said Li, 32. More than 10 men and women, some dressed in black and masked, all bearing knives, had begun slashing and stabbing anyone they could reach, including children.
Close to the ticket hall, Li's husband, Pan Huabing, saw an attacker launch a blow at his daughter and threw himself in its path. Cut badly on the throat, he clutched his unharmed daughter on the ground. As another assailant approached, Pan's friend Zuo Ruxing, a fellow welder, grabbed the girl and his own son, also 6, and ran for their lives, he told The Beijing News.
At a nearby hotel, a desperate Li later found them. Police ended the carnage by shooting dead four of the suspected attackers, including one woman, said state broadcaster CCTV Sunday. The one assailant taken alive, wounded by police fire, was also female. Police were searching for at least five more.
At least 29 people were killed and 143 wounded. according to Xinhua News Agency. The incident ranks as one of China's worst and most deadly acts of terror, according to city authorities. Xinhua cited them saying evidence shows the attack was by "Xinjiang separatist forces" who seek independence for the vast region of Xinjiang in China's northwest. It is home to 10 million Uighur, a mostly Muslim people.
As Kunming residents struggled to come to terms with the bloodshed visited upon their usually peaceful city, a popular holiday destination in China, many relatives faced anxious waits for the wounded and missing.
"Thanks to Mr. Zuo, and my husband, my daughter could keep her life," a grateful Li Jinmei said by telephone from her husband's hospital, one of 11 treating the injured.
But after seven hours of surgery, "doctors said he isn't out of danger. He's still in an ICU," said Li, who worries about the mental impact of the horror their daughter witnessed. "I'm a housewife. I've never heard of Uighurs before. I only know we have no enmity against them, but how could they be so cruel?" she said. "I can't understand why they would do that to my child and my husband."
Chinese authorities, issuing the same judgment given to several recent assaults on police stations in Xinjiang, said Saturday's incident was "a premeditated, organized, serious, violent terrorist attack" by Xinjiang separatists. Beijing blames outside forces and religious extremists for fomenting trouble between the Uighur and the Han, China's majority ethnic group, who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades.
Uighur activist groups accuse Chinese authorities of causing unrest through repressive, discriminatory policies. The U.S. State Department said last week there was "severe official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, association and assembly of ethnic Uighurs" in Xinjiang in 2013.
Adding to calls for swift action from China's Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, the domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu, who had rushed to Kunming, said "the terrorists were devoid of conscience, brutally attacked unarmed civilians, exposed their anti-humanity and anti-society nature, and they should be harshly punished in accordance with the law," Xinhua reported.
A commentary carried by Xinhua on Sunday titled "Nothing justifies civilian slaughter in China's "9-11'" argued that China's recent decision to establish a national security committee chaired by Xi is "very timely and necessary." After Saturday, "a nationwide outrage has been stirred. Justice needs to be done and terrorists should be punished," the commentary said.
Most previous incidents of Xinjiang-related violence have been limited to Xinjiang. Saturday's attack in Yunnan province, more than 1,000 miles to the southeast, follows another in Beijing last October, when a Uighur family of three drove a car into Tiananmen Gate and detonated it, killing themselves and two pedestrians and injuring 40 people.
This second incident "will be quite worrying for Beijing, as it shows the spread of the sphere of activity to the Chinese heartland, and a few steps along in developing their strategy by a separatist or terrorist organization," said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang and terrorism at Australia's Griffith University.
Although Beijing insists that Xinjiang terror attacks are inspired from abroad, Saturday's assault, like many in recent years, still reveals "a low level of sophistication, being armed with knives, not the sophisticated, well-armed terror attack of the al-Qaeda variety," Clarke said.
Chinese state policy "is partly responsible for what we're seeing," he said, because of Uighur anger at crackdowns on Islamic practice, and other ways of controlling Uighur culture, and the perception that Xinjiang is being colonized by Han immigrants.
"Severe discrimination and repressive policies lead to Uighur people being wounded in their hearts, and may provoke the victims to adopt these kind of extreme measures," Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman in Sweden for the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group, said in a written statement. He said there was no justification for attacks on common people.
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