Sat, Sep 05, 2009 page5

• Victims of Xinjiang syringe attack fear hidden infections

  • AFP
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  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.
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