Three militants sentenced to death and one gets life for ‘China’s 9/11’

A court in southwestern China on Friday sentenced three people to death and one to life in jail for an attack at a train station earlier this year in which 31 people died, state television said on its official microblog. The government blamed the attack on militants from China’s far western region of Xinjiang. The four knife-wielding attackers went on trial on Friday, charged with murder and organising a terror group, a case that triggered a sweeping crackdown on what Beijing calls militant violence. The March 1 carnage at a train station in Kunming, in southwestern China, also saw more than 140 people wounded and was dubbed “China’s 9/11” by state-run media.

[The suspects were] influenced by extremist religious thinking.

A Kunming court

The government has said knife-wielding militants from the autonomous region of Xinjiang launched a premeditated attack in March at the Kunming station in Yunnan province, killing 31 people and injured 141 injured. Police shot dead four of the attackers. The Kunming incident was the biggest-ever violent incident against civilians outside the region. China’s courts have a near-100 percent conviction rate and the death penalty is regularly handed down in terrorism cases. China last month announced the executions of eight people for “terrorist attacks”, including three it described as “masterminding” the car crash in Tiananmen Square. That came after 13 people were executed in June for attacks in Xinjiang. Xinjiang, resource-rich and strategically located on the borders of central Asia, is crucial to China’s growing energy needs.

Asia-Pacific