Police in southern China announced they have detained a person suspected of spreading rumors on the Internet that triggered violent clashes and a major security clampdown.
The public security bureau in Guangzhou announced on its official page on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, that the suspect surnamed Chen was detained on Tuesday and had confessed to publishing false information online.
The clashes in Xintang, a district in the greater Guangzhou area, began last Friday after rumors spread that police had beaten a street hawker to death and manhandled his pregnant wife.
Authorities were forced to deploy hundreds of officers and armored vehicles as the protests continued into the weekend, with people hurling bricks and bottles at local officials and police, and vandalizing ATMs and police posts.
Armed police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and at least 25 people have been arrested so far.
The man rumored to have been killed appeared at a press conference held by the local government on Sunday, saying he, his wife and their unborn baby girl were “doing very well.”
“The false information spread on Weibo, QQ [China’s popular instant messaging service] and online forums had a nasty influence on society,” the police said late on Wednesday.
The riots in Guangdong Province, China’s industrial heartland, are the latest in a recent flare-up of unrest in the country, which analysts say highlights resentment towards an unresponsive government.
On Thursday, 1,500 people clashed with riot squads in the central province of Hubei following the alleged death in police custody of a local legislator.
Earlier last week, hundreds of people battled police and destroyed cars in another incident in Guangdong Province, after a factory worker was wounded in a knife attack over a wage dispute and late last month, thousands of ethnic Mongolians protested in northern China for several days after the killing of a herder laid bare simmering anger over what some perceive as Chinese oppression.
The protests have compounded the unease of a government already concerned that Arab-style unrest could spread to China and rising inflation spark more violence.
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
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
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS