Community | July 06, 2009 | 7 comments

China arrests more than 1,400 suspects in connection to ethnic riots which have killed 156

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31753771/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

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Police have arrested 1,434 suspects in connection with the worst ethnic violence in decades in China's western Xinjiang region, which killed at least 156 people, state media reported Tuesday.

The arrests come amid a security clampdown on the region, with hundreds of paramilitary police with shields, rifles and clubs taking control of the streets of the capital, Urumqi, where the riots took place on Sunday.

The violence does not bode well for China's efforts to mollify long-simmering ethnic tensions between the minority Uighur people and the ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang — a sprawling region three times the size of Texas that shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries.

"We haven't had anything like this, really, ever," said Dru Gladney, a Uighur expert at the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California. "It really gives strong evidence of widespread unrest and discontentment."

Mobile-phone service and the social-networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links also were cut or slowed down.

A nonviolent protest by 200 people was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua News Agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organize more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu.

It said police had raided several groups plotting unrest in Dawan township in Urumqi, as well as at a former race course that is home to a transient population...
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