Chinese troops fill streets to halt ethnic violence

URUMQI, China (AP) — Thousands of Chinese troops flooded into this city Wednesday to separate feuding ethnic groups after three days of communal violence left 156 people dead, and a senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting in western China.

Long convoys of armored cars and green troop trucks with riot police rumbled through Urumqi, a city of 2.3 million people.

Other security forces carrying automatic rifles with bayonets formed cordons to defend Muslim neighborhoods from marauding groups of vigilantes with sticks.

Military helicopters buzzed over Xinjiang’s regional capital, dropping pamphlets urging people to stay in their homes and stop fighting. Special police from other provinces were called in to patrol the city.

The crisis was so severe that President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy, where he was to participate in a Group of Eight summit. It was an embarrassing move for a leader who wants to show that China has a harmonious society as it prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist rule.

The heightened security came amid the worst spasm of ethnic violence in decades in Xinjiang — a sprawling, oil-rich territory that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries. The region is home to the Uighur ethnic minority, who rioted Sunday and attacked the Han Chinese — the nation’s biggest ethnic group — after holding a protest that was ended by police.

Officials have said 156 people were killed as the Turkic-speaking Uighurs ran amok in the city, beating and stabbing the Han Chinese. The Uighurs allege that trigger-happy security forces gunned down many of the protesters, and officials have yet to give an ethnic breakdown of those killed.

In Rome, a Germany-based Uighur leader, Erkin Alptekin, told The Associated Press that “our countrymen in China” reported that 600-800 Uighurs were killed in the past few days and 3,000 were arrested.

“We were told [by fellow Uighurs] that 140 were dead on the spot” on Sunday and that their bodies were tossed into trucks and taken away by Chinese security forces, said Alptekin, who briefed the human-rights commission in the Italian parliament.

“When the Uighurs heard the people were fired upon, parents all came out looking for their sons and daughters,” he said, adding that security forces started to “disperse them by force, then started to beat them, tear-gas them and shoot them.”

More than 1,100 people were wounded in the violence. Dr. Yuan Hong of Urumqi People’s Hospital said most of the people treated at his facility were clubbed, while others had been cut by knives.