Six villagers were killed and eight badly hurt when several hundred allegedly hired thugs descended on a village in northern China and clashed with local residents over a land dispute, state press said yesterday.
The incident occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning when five busloads of men ransacked Shengyou village in Hebei Province with hunting rifles, clubs, sharpened pipes and other weapons, Beijing News reported.
The attackers, wearing construction helmets, were mostly young men in their twenties allegedly hired by a local electricity company, it said.
Some 48 villagers were injured and hospitalized, the paper said. Among the dead was a 60-year-old villager who was killed by gunfire several hundred meters from where the clashes took place.
The village has refused to accept land compensation since 2003 from the Hebei Guohua Power Co which hopes to build a power plant on 26 hectares of village land, the paper said.
Parts of the battle, which lasted for about an hour, were videotaped by local villagers, it said.
The clash was not the first in the village.
On April 20 a similar incident took place in which some 20 youths attacked residents in the middle of the night, telling them to move off the land, the paper said.
One of the youths, identified as Zhu Xiaorui, was reportedly captured by the villagers at that time and has been in their custody ever since.
Zhu admitted that he was hired in nearby Beijing and paid 100 yuan (US$12) to come to the village and beat people up.
Officials in Dingzhou prefecture, which has jurisdiction over Shengyou village, have set up a special group to investigate the incident.
According to the paper, the power company is seeking to requisition 116 hectares from 13 villages in the region to build the power plant, with only Shengyou village refusing the compensation package.
It was unclear why so much land was needed for the plant.
The company and local police were not immediately available for comment.
Land requisition by the state has become one of China's sharpest social issues with an increasing number of evicted people in both urban and rural regions accusing governments of illegal land grabs they say are enriching the ruling elite.
In China, all land is owned by the state, giving local officials tremendous powers over land use rights.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including