Jiang Ye was waiting for a friend at the train station in China’s northwestern city of Urumqi when she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her left arm.
Jiang, 36, is one of more than 450 people who authorities say were attacked in recent weeks with syringes in the capital of Xinjiang, the scene of deadly unrest in July pitting Han Chinese against Muslim Uighurs.
Victims told reporters that the mysterious assaults continued yesterday and sparked mass protests in Urumqi on Thursday, reviving ethnic tension in the already uneasy city.
Tens of thousands of people, most of them Han Chinese, had filled the streets to demand the government do more to ensure public safety. More than 1,000 people staged protests yesterday before being dispersed by police.
Jiang, who spoke to reporters yesterday as she left the infectious diseases department of the Xinjiang People’s Hospital, said she was not afraid to go out in public after the incident, but remains concerned about her health.
“It happened the day before yesterday at the train station. I was picking someone up at the train and he was coming out with a crowd of other people when suddenly I felt this sharp stabbing pain in my arm,” said Jiang, who is Han.
“I didn’t see who did it. It was raining really hard and the sky was dark, but I do recall that there were some Uighurs right near me at that point,” she said.
She rolled up the left sleeve of her blouse to reveal a bruise the size of a coin with a pinprick hole at the center.
“I’m very worried now — the hospital says there should be no problem, but they also said that with some diseases you won’t know for six months or a year whether you have it,” she said.
State media reports have said that 476 people sought treatment in hospitals after being stabbed, adding that Uighurs were among the victims, but the official reports have been vague about the identities of the perpetrators.
Ahmatjan, a 52-year-old Uighur who works in the administration of Xinjiang University, said he was stabbed with a needle in the back on Thursday while returning home from work.
“It was a young Uighur man in his teens. It still hurts,” he said, while filling out an incident report in a police station yesterday, using the graceful Uighur script.
No one had been infected or poisoned in the assaults, Xinhua news agency reported, and it remained unclear what the syringes contained, if anything.
Hospital staff told Ahmatjan there appeared to be nothing in the syringe, but that did not ease the fears of his wife, 48-year-old Reyihan.
“They said there is probably no problem now and that we can just treat it if a problem emerges later. But what if it is a serious problem? He is already in his 50s and won’t be able to fight disease as well in the future,” she said.
“These people will attack anyone, even their own Uighurs, just to create chaos in society. But they won’t accomplish anything,” she said.
Several victims said they believed syringes were being used because a security crackdown since the July unrest had made it much more difficult to possess larger weapons without detection.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS