Published: December 12, 2012
BEIJING — A Chinese court in the northwest region of Xinjiang has sentenced to death three men who were convicted of trying to blow up a commercial airliner in June in what the state media described as an act of religious-inspired extremism.
The three men, and a fourth who was given a life sentence on Tuesday for cooperating with authorities, are ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority that practices Islam and has long bridled at Chinese rule.
The men, from the oasis city of Hotan, reportedly attempted to hijack a Tianjin Airlines flight and ignite explosives but were subdued by the passengers and crew, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Two other participants injured during the in-flight scuffle died in custody “despite receiving medical treatment,” it said.
The report said the defendants did not dispute the allegations in court.
Uighur exile groups condemned the convictions, saying they were the product of an unfair trial that turned on confessions extracted through torture. The World Uighur Congress, based in Germany, said the men were not able to choose their own lawyers and the trial was closed to the public. “These types of incidents and the convictions foment further discontent among the Uighur people,” Rebiya Kadeer, the group’s president, said in a statement.
According to the accounts published in the state media, the six men stood up midflight, shouted “religious extremist slogans,” and then attacked the cockpit door with a pair of crutches that had been sharpened at the ends. Their effort to light the explosives failed.
The reports did not include a description of the explosives or how the men smuggled them through China’s rigorous passenger-screening process.
The three men sentenced to death on Tuesday were Musa Yusuf, Arsdikali Yimin and Omar Yimin; a fourth, Alimu Musa, received a life sentence after he showed “a good attitude in admitting his crimes,” Xinhua said.
Beijing, alarmed by a spate of Uighur attacks on the police and Chinese migrants from the east, has bolstered economic development in Xinjiang, but it has also employed heavy-handed tactics in an effort to pacify the region.
Since 2009, Chinese courts have issued numerous death sentences to Uighur defendants, including more than two dozen implicated in rioting that year in Urumqi, the regional capital, that claimed nearly 200 lives, most of them Han Chinese. In the aftermath, overseas groups say, an unknown number of Uighurs died at the hands of the police while in custody.
