BEIJING — Police investigating a vehicle that plowed through pedestrians and crashed at Beijing’s Forbidden City in an apparent suicide rampage searched Tuesday for information on two ethnic Uighur suspects believed linked to the attack, which killed five people and injured 38.
Police released no information about a possible motive for Monday’s incident at one of China’s most politically sensitive and heavily guarded public spaces. But investigators sent a notice to hotels in the city aimed at tracing the recent movements of two suspects, and possibly at uncovering any other conspirators.
The sports utility vehicle veered inside a barrier separating a crowded sidewalk from a busy avenue and then plowed through pedestrians as it sped toward Tiananmen Gate, where it crashed into a stone structure near a large portrait of Mao Zedong which hangs near the entrance to the former imperial palace.
The vehicle’s three occupants were killed along with two bystanders, including a Filipino woman. The 38 injured included three other Filipinos and a Japanese man, police said.
The gate stands opposite sprawling Tiananmen Square, which was the focus of the 1989 pro-democracy movement that was violently suppressed by the military, and any incident there is highly sensitive.
Zhao Fuzhou, a security official at Beijing’s Xinjiang Dasha hotel, said police had circulated a notice seeking information about two suspects with Uighur names in the aftermath of Monday’s incident. A clerk at the Hubei Mansion hotel also confirmed receiving the notice, while employees at other hotels said they’d been told not to discuss the matter.
The notice asked hotels about the two suspects, and to report any suspicious guests or vehicles registered with their establishments going back to Oct. 1. One of the men, identified in the notice as Yusupu Wumaierniyazi, was listed as living in a town in the northwestern Uighur homeland of Xinjiang in which 24 police and civilians and 13 militants were killed in an attack on June 26.
Beijing police referred reporters’ questions to a spokesman whose phone rang unanswered.
Radicals among the Muslim Turkic Uighurs have been fighting a low-intensity insurgency against Chinese rule for years. This summer saw an unusually large number of violent incidents and Chinese security forces say they have been guarding against attacks outside of Xinjiang.
Uighurs are culturally, religiously and linguistically distinct from China’s ethnic Han majority and many have chafed under heavy-handed Communist Party rule.
If intended as a political statement, Monday’s attack could hardly have picked a more significant target. Just west of the square lies the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s parliament, while many of China’s top leaders live and work just a few hundred meters (yards) away in the tightly guarded Zhongnanhai compound.
Monday’s incident had every appearance of being deliberate, since the driver apparently jumped a curb and travelled about 400 metres to the spot where the car was said to have caught fire.
Along the way, it avoided trees, street lights and at least one security checkpoint. The attackers also struck during the lunch hour when security would have likely been relatively slack.
Witnesses quoted in Chinese media said the SUV’s driver honked his horn as he drove along the sidewalk, suggesting mass murder was not the intention.
Photos showed flames licking the vehicle and a huge cloud of smoke, although there was no word on whether an incendiary device had been activated or shots fired.
“The vehicle ran very fast, I could hear people screaming all the way while the vehicle ploughed through the crowds,” the Global Times newspaper quoted an unidentified female witness as saying.