2015-06-17
Railway police in the Shaanxi provincial capital Xi’an “shot down a man on Wednesday at a train station who had charged into a ticket line with a brick,” according to a post on the official Weibo account of the Xi’an Railway Police.
According to the statement, the man had been spotted “rushing a line of people” in the ticket hall early in the morning.
“The man was shot and injured after he ignored repeated police warnings. He died in spite of emergency treatment,” the statement said.
An earlier post said that the man was a Uyghur but the reference to his ethnicity was later deleted, according to the Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Photos posted online showed the pixelated image of a man lying on the ground with several police officers standing around him.
The statement had earlier said the man was a member of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group from the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang, but references to his ethnicity were later removed from the post.
‘Looked like a Uyghur’
An eyewitness told RFA that the man appeared to be a Uyghur.
“He was from Xinjiang, and he went to attack the crowd with a brick,” the eyewitness said. “He was shot dead with a single bullet by police.”
“Apart from that, I don’t know the details,” he said.
A source inside the Xi’an police department told RFA that the city’s chief of police had rushed to the scene in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
“He took a brick and went as if to hurt people standing in the ticket hall of the station,” the source said.
“All the city police chiefs are here, including the head of the police department himself.”
He said the authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack.
“The anti-terrorism squad is here, too,” the source said. “They have set up a special investigative team, I think.”
Ban on fasting
The shooting comes as millions of Uyghurs begin observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this week under increasing official pressure not to fast.
Uyghur officials and other state employees like teachers have been banned from fasting, and it is against the law for children under 18 to take part in religious activities.
Restaurants in the region are typically required to stay open all day, even if the owners are Muslim, and Uyghur children and young people are often required to attend free lunches in the region’s schools and universities to avoid the dawn-to-dusk fast traditionally observed during Ramadan.
