IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
Three people were seriously injured in the explosion, which destroyed the Uighur restaurant.
BEINJING – In a new sign of rising sectarian tension in China, an explosion destroyed a Uighur restaurant in a busy section of Beijing early Friday, September 25.
“I looked and I saw that the building was all crumbled and there was some smoke,” Sun Jia, 43, a resident of Xinjiekou area of central Beijing, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“And I saw a young man with blood all over the side of his head and one side of his body. It looked like his ear had been badly injured.”
Three restaurant employees were seriously injured in the explosion, which also wounded an unknown number of passers-by.
The cause of the blast is not yet known, but police labelled it a gas explosion.
“According to the initial investigation, the explosion was an accident,” a policewoman told AFP.
The building housing the restaurant had partially collapsed, an AFP reporter at the scene witnessed.
The windows of adjacent businesses, and even some 100 metres (109 yards) away, were blown out or shattered.
State-run Xinhua news agency, quoting a witness surnamed Qiao, said the restaurant had collapsed, “burying some people in the debris”.
Police kept hundreds of onlookers and a large number of reporters from gaining access to the blast scene, where several diggers and bulldozers were quickly cleaning up debris.
The blast came amid a massive security clampdown in the Chinese capital to prevent disruptions to sensitive October 1 celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of communist China.
Tension
Residents said the restaurant featured specialties from China’s northwestern Muslim-majority Xinjiang region.
“It was a Xinjiang restaurant,” a man who runs a nearby convenience store told AFP.
“All I heard was one loud boom.”
Xinjiang was plunged into turmoil in July after thousands of minority Uighur Muslims went to the streets to protest discrimination and religious and cultural controls in their region.
Chinese security forces launched a deadly crackdown on the protestors, leaving nearly 200 people dead and 1,700 wounded.
In recent weeks, tension rose up in the troubled region after incidents of syringe attacks that victims blame on Uighurs.
In Beijing, Xinjiang-style restaurants, with their barbecued-meat skewers and flatbread, are ubiquitous and popular.
“They’re all good, hard-working people,” a 40-year-old man who would only give his surname, Zhao, told The New York Times.
“We’ve lived together for 10 years and we get along well. Clearly this was an accident.”
Xinjiang and its Uighur Muslims, a Turkish-speaking minority of more than eight million, continue to be the subject of massive security crackdowns.
Muslims accuses the government of settling millions of ethnic Han in their territory with the ultimate goal of obliterating its identity and culture.
Beijing views the vast region as an invaluable asset because of its crucial strategic location near Central Asia and its large oil and gas reserves.
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