31/10/2013 09:44
Five arrested in Tiananmen Square incident, deemed a terrorist attack
Five suspects have been detained in Monday's deadly crash in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which has been identified as a terrorist attack, Beijing police said Wednesday, according to CNN.
The attack -- in which five people died and dozens were hurt -- was "carefully planned, organized and premeditated," police said on their official Weibo account online.
Working with police in northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Beijing police captured the suspects, a spokesman for the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau said.
The spokesman, who was not named, said Usmen Hasan; his mother, Kuwanhan Reyim; and his wife, Gulkiz Gini, drove a jeep bearing a Xinjiang license plate into a crowd in the famed square at noon on Monday, killing two people and injuring another 40.
Authorities had earlier put the number of injured at 38.
The jeep then crashed into a guardrail of Jinshui Bridge across the moat of the Forbidden City. All three of the jeep's occupants died when they set gasoline afire, the spokesman said. The other two fatalities were tourists; a woman from the Philippines and a Chinese man.
Police found gasoline, two knives and steel sticks "as well as a flag with extremist religious content" in the jeep, the police posting said.
In addition, authorities found knives and a "jihad" flag in the temporary residence of the five detained suspects, it added.
Tensions between Han Chinese and the largely Muslim Uyghurs have sometimes turned violent.
A spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, a diaspora group, said Wednesday it was not clear that Uyghurs played any role.