June 30, 2008
Mobs angry over alleged cover-up of girl's rape and murder
attack govt buildings By Tracy Quek BEIJING - THOUSANDS of angry
residents in a south-western Chinese county smashed government
buildings and torched several police cars over the weekend to
protest against an alleged cover-up of a girl's death.
As many as 10,000 people were involved in the protest in Weng'an
county of Guizhou province.
Seen in pictures posted online, rioters smashed the windows and
wrecked the facade of at least one government building. They also
overturned and torched several police cars. Plumes of black smoke
and fire could be seen rising from the burning vehicles.
The unrest happened amid heightened security concerns just 39
days before the start of the Beijing Olympics. President Hu Jintao
has stressed that ensuring stability is a top government priority
ahead of and during the Games.
The Guizhou protest also follows several incidents in recent
months, including the March riots in Tibet and smaller protests by
parents whose children had died in schools that collapsed during
the May 12 Sichuan earthquake.
Unverified accounts of the Guizhou riot, including a report by
Hong Kong's Ming Pao, identified the girl as 15-year-old student Li
Shufei.
She was said to have been raped and murdered by the son of a
high-ranking Weng'an county official and another youth. Her body
was then dumped into a river.
The alleged assailants were detained by local police but
released on the same day without being charged. Police later said
the girl had committed suicide.
Outraged by the official explanation, her relatives sought out
the police but were reportedly assaulted instead. Her uncle, a
local teacher died after a severe beating, according to the
reports.
His death was said to have prompted his students to march on the
local authorities, triggering a bigger protest.
The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and
Democracy said up to 150 people were injured in the clashes with
the police.
Some 200 rioters have been arrested. More are likely to be
detained as police round up people identified in footage of the
riots. Over 1,500 paramilitary and riot police have been dispatched
to the county, the centre said.
Photographs as well as comments on the Guizhou protest in
chatrooms and forums were quickly deleted by China's Internet
censors, but not before some of the content was captured by
websites hosted overseas.
In a rare move, the official Xinhua news agency reported the
Weng'an incident yesterday, but said only that riots had started
because people were 'dissatisfied over the medical and legal
expertise over the teenager's death'.
'When officials were handling the case, some people who didn't
know about the exact context of what had happened were instigated
to mob the police station and the office buildings of the county
government and Communist Party committee,' Xinhua added.
The number of protests and riots across China have increased in
recent years over many issues including corruption and unlawful
appropriation of farm land.
The unrest is proving a tough challenge to Mr Hu's attempt to
build a 'harmonious society'.
These incidents often go unreported by Chinese media. Accounts,
however, increasingly appear online as more Chinese turn to the
Internet to give their version of things.
The Public Security Bureau has stopped making public the annual
number of mass incidents - a term Chinese officials use to refer to
large-scale unrest. The latest figures show there were 87,000 mass
incidents in 2005, up 6.6 per cent on 2004 and 50 per cent on
2003.
