CHINA:THOUSANDS OF rioters burned police cars and government office buildings in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou yesterday after allegations that local officials covered up a teenage girl's death.
The riots began after a 15-year-old girl was raped and murdered. The story that flashed around Weng'an county was that three men were responsible, one of them reportedly the son of the deputy mayor. When the police report said she had killed herself, tensions really began to simmer.
When the girl's popular schoolteacher uncle went to the police to seek justice, he was beaten into a coma and subsequently died.
Public dissent of any kind is not tolerated in China. Lacking any of the usual means to vent their anger, the people of Weng'an took to the streets and turned the town upside down, and the YouTube website carried shocking pictures of burning police cars and local government offices. Such scenes of mayhem and anarchy are the ones the Communist Party fears most as it is always worried that dissent could spread nationwide.
The riots even made it onto the official Xinhua news agency, which ran a brief story and blamed the riots on unhappiness over the official ruling over the girl's death. It said order had been restored.
According to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, over 10,000 people took to the streets in the protests, with up to 150 people injured in clashes with police.
The local Communist Party headquarters was almost totally gutted.
Another 1,500 paramilitary and riot police were deployed to the county and police arrested nearly 200 rioters. Yesterday they were using the video footage posted on-line to round up others caught ransacking the three government and police buildings.