Cops say China blasts a criminal not terrorist act

A SERIES of package bombs exploded on Wednesday in the southwest China city of Liuzhou, killing at least seven people and injuring 51, state media said.

The official Xinhua news agency said police had determined the blasts were a “criminal” act and identified the suspect as a 33-year-old local man surnamed Wei, but added the investigation was continuing.

Media images showed a collapsed building, smoke and streets strewn with rubble in Liuzhou, in the Guangxi region.

Two people were still missing, state radio said on its microblog.

Bombs were sent to 13 places ranging from hospitals and shopping malls to prisons and government offices, reports said, adding that a terrorist attack had been ruled out.

The Ministry of Public Security has sent a team of experts to help with the investigation, Xinhua said.

Guangxi sits on the border with Vietnam and has several ethnic minorities, but is generally peaceful.

Explosives are relatively easy to come by in China, as they are widely used in its large mining industry.

Such “sudden incidents”, as Chinese authorities refer to them, are sometimes seen as linked to a widening gap between rich and poor and anger at corruption or environmental issues.

Hundreds have died in recent years in China’s far western region of Xinjiang, in violence blamed by the government on Islamist militants.

In another development, at least 50 people died in an attack last month at a coal mine in China’s far-western Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia reported yesterday, as a visiting senior leader warned that the security situation in the violence-prone region was “very serious”.

The government says it faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists in energy-rich Xinjiang, on the border of central Asia, where hundreds have died in violence in recent years.

But exiles and rights groups say China has never presented convincing evidence of the existence of a cohesive militant group fighting the government.

They claim that much of the unrest can be traced back to frustration at controls over the culture and religion of the Uighur people who live in Xinjiang – a charge that Beijing denies.

US-based Radio Free Asia said the number of people killed in the September 18 attack at the Sogan colliery in Aksu had reached 50.

Most casualties were apparently members of the Han Chinese majority, and police blamed knife-wielding separatist

Radio Free Asia said that when police officers arrived at the mine, attackers “rammed their vehicles using trucks loaded down with coal”.

“Nearly all the workers who were not on shift at the time were killed or injured,” a police officer told the radio station.

Such incidents are frequently reported in overseas media but not confirmed by the Chinese government until days later, if ever. — Reuters