Daily News Channel
China’s President Hu Jintao called Tuesday for a "prosperous and harmonious" Xinjiang province during his first visit to the country’s western Uyghur region since last month’s deadly riots, state-run media reported.
Hundreds of people have been detained in connection with ethnic riots in the northwest last month, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported Sunday. Police in Urumqi, the capital of China’s remote northwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region, said they had detained 319 people in connection with the July 5 riots, according to Xinhua. The detentions came in addition to the 253 detentions announced on July 29, the news agency said
Hackers repeatedly attacked the Web site of Australia’s largest film festival Saturday, asking organizers to apologize to the Chinese people for planning to screen a documentary on an exiled Uyghur leader. The attacks were carried out on the opening day of the Melbourne International Film Festival — in what organizers are calling the third phase of a “concerted campaign” to withdraw the film “The 10 Conditions of Love.” The documentary examines the impact on the family of activist Rebiya Kadeer as she fights for greater autonomy of the ethnic minority group, the Uyghurs, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China’s northwest. Kadeer is the president of the World Uyghur Congress, made up of exiled Uyghurs.
A militant leader whose group has links to al Qaeda denounced Chinese treatment of Uyghur Muslims in western China and threatened to seek "revenge." The leader of the Turkistan Islamic Party, in a video that appeared on Islamic Web sites, blames the Chinese for “genocide” against people in East Turkistan — what some Uyghurs calls the region of Xinjiang province in western China where they live. Earlier this month, Uyghurs demonstrated in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, to protest the killing of two Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory in the southeast Chinese province of Guangdong in late June after a brawl between Uyghur and Han people.
At least 184 people died in last weekend’s violent protests in China’s far-west Xinjiang region, state-run media reported. That number raises the death toll from a previously reported 156.
China recorded its first death Friday from a moderate earthquake that struck the country’s southwest the night before, state-run media reported.
Five major mosques near the center of violence last weekend in Urumqi, the capital of China’s far-west Xinjiang region, were closed Friday morning, state-run media reported. Same smaller mosques in the city remained open, according to the Xinhua news agency. “Mosques in some sensitive areas were closed at their imams’ suggestion,” an official in charge of religious affairs with the Xinjiang regional government said Friday.