Crowds of young Muslims beat people to death and torched cars during pro-independence riots in far western China, a policeman said Monday.
Those reported killed in the melee varied widely, from at least four people dead to nearly 300. There was no way to immediately reconcile the conflicting death tolls.The riots last Wednesday and Thursday were the worst to hit Yining, in the restive Chinese province of Xinjiang (pronounced sin-jeeang), since the 1949 Communist takeover, the Yining city police officer said.
The city is near the border with the former Soviet republic of Kazakstan.
Four or five people were killed, some of them beaten to death, said the officer, reached by telephone from Beijing. He refused to give his name.
Security forces arrested up to 500 people and released some later, he said. Three cars were set on fire and police fired shots into the air to calm the crowds, he said.
Ming Pao, a Hong Kong daily, said local TV reported more than 10 Chinese were killed and their bodies set on fire, and more than 100 people were injured in the riots. It quoted a Yining resident as saying that 1,000 Muslims beat, killed and burned their victims before police quashed the violence.
Modan Mukhlisi, a spokesman for the United National Revolution Front, a Uighur separatist group based in Kazakstan, said 30 Uighurs died in the riots.
Ismail Cengiz, the secretary general of a pro-independence Uighur group based in Istanbul, Turkey, claimed that 200 Muslim rioters and about 100 Chinese soldiers were killed in the melee.
The Yining policeman said the rioters were Uighurs (pronounced wee-gers), Xinjiang's Muslim majority, demanding independence for the region. Clashes are periodically reported in Xinjiang, where the Turkic-speaking Uighurs face an influx of ethnic Chinese.
"There was a protest . . . It was illegal," said an official with Xinjiang's provincial government, who gave his surname, Liu. "Illegal protests are curbed."
Covering one-sixth of China, Xinjiang has a population of 16.6 million, of whom 38 percent are ethnic Chinese, according to Chinese figures. The Uighurs had their own Republic of East Turkestan from 1944 to 1949. Xinjiang is now one of five autonomous regions of China.