China : Armed Assailants Stormed Dorms
source: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/armedchinese-07042009104353.html
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HONG KONG—Three youths belonging to the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group and now under Chinese government protection after ethnic clashes in the southern province of Guangdong said fighting began when Han Chinese laborers stormed the dormitories of Uyghur colleagues, beating them with clubs, bars, and machetes.
The deadly fighting between Turkic-speaking, Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese at the Lacewood toy factory in Guangdong's Shaoguan city began late June 25 and lasted into the early hours of the following day.
Authorities said two people died and 118 were injured in the clashes, which were sparked by an online report that Uyghur migrant workers at the factory had raped two Chinese women. A Chinese man is now detained for "forging" that report.
Excerpts of interviews with the three men, conducted on a single, hidden cell phone, follow. All spoke on condition of anonymity, and while their accounts cannot be independently verified, they are consistent:
Uyghur Man 1: Who are you?
RFA: Radio Free Asia's Uyghur service. We broadcast in the Uyghur language.
Uyghur Man 1: We do not have any freedom here. If they hear us talking on the phone, they will punish us.
RFA: Where were you when the brawl happened?
Uyghur Man 1: We were taking our meal break after the night shift, when the day shifters [Uyghurs] were sleeping in their dorms. We saw them [Han Chinese] storm into their dorms, pull them out from their beds, and start beating them, hacking and burning.
RFA: What time was it when this happened?
Uyghur Man 1: It was around 12:30 a.m. or 1 a.m.
RFA: How many people stormed in?
Uyghur Man 1: Thousands of Chinese, and 800 Uyghurs were there.
RFA: How do you know there were thousands?
Uyghur Man 1: This factory is very big.
RFA:...Chinese workers attacked you?
Uyghur Man 1: Yes, as long as Uyghurs were around, they attacked us.
RFA: Everyone including female workers attacked you, or only male workers?
Uyghur Man 1: The females, too, were against us, and they were throwing things at us from the tops of buildings.
RFA: Apart from factory workers, were there any members of gangs from outside among the attackers?...
Uyghur Man 1: Yes.
RFA: How many of them were there?
Uyghur Man 1: It was dark, so we could not tell how many.
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- Community, Peoples Republic of China
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'No Rapes' in Riot Town
This video, apparently shot by Chinese witnesses inside the toy factory in Shaoguan city, Guangdong, was posted on Sohu.com, taken down, and republished several times. Voices can be heard commenting on events in Mandarin.
HONG KONG—Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have said they found no evidence that ethnic minority Uyghur laborers had raped two Chinese girls, a rumor they blamed for last week's ethnic fighting at a toy factory in Shaoguan city.
According to official media reports, police also detained a former worker at the city's Xuri toy factory for posting the rumor on the Internet in the first place.
"Six Xinjiang boys raped two innocent girls at the Xuri Toy Factory," ran the text of the posting, the official Xinhua news agency reported, quoting a Shaoguan municipal spokesman.
The detained man, surnamed Zhu, faked the information to express his discontent after the factory declined to re-hire him after his quit his job, Xinhua said.
"Police found no rape cases at the Xuri Toy Factory," the agency said, referring to a factory owned by Hong Kong-listed Lacewood International, which started making toys and handbags in 2007 in Shaoguan with 10,000 employees, one of the largest factories in the north of the province.
At least two people were killed and 118 injured after rival groups of workers fought each other in a pitched battle that began on the streets of Shaoguan last Thursday evening, and ended in the early hours of Friday.
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