Chinese state media seek tough punishment for terrorists after attack

State media condemned what they described as a "jihad" against China and called for heavy punishment for Islamist militants from the restive western region of Xinjiang, whom they believe are behind the assaults such as the SUV terror attack on Tiananmen Square.

The jeep that crashed through pedestrians near the old imperial palace, the Forbidden City, was set on fire by the occupants of the vehicle – a man, his wife and his mother – and a police investigation has confirmed it was a carefully calculated terrorist attack.

Police discovered gasoline, knives, steel bars and other equipment, including a flag with extremist slogans during their search, and authorities in Beijing believe religious extremists from the Xinjiang Uighur region were responsible for the attacks.

Insurgency
A simmering insurgency in the region has occasionally boiled over into violence over the past 20 years, although the unrest has never before spilled over into the nation's capital.

The attack killed two tourists, as well as the three terrorists in the vehicle, and left 40 injured; 12 of whom are still in intensive care.

Police said they had caught five accomplices in Beijing who they said were Islamist militants planning a holy war.

"Violent terrorist crime is the shared enemy of all humanity, the shared enemy of all ethnic groups in the country, and it must be severely punished under the law," the People's Daily, the official organ of the ruling Communist Party, said in an opinion piece on its website.

“Maintaining the capital’s security and stability is a responsibility of utmost importance,” it said.

Xinjiang's eight million Turkic-speaking Uighurs are an ethnic group that shares close linguistic and cultural links to central Asia and are distinct from China's majority Han.

Reprisals
In July 2009 local Uighurs turned on Han Chinese in Urumqi – an incident that led to deadly reprisals by Han on Uighurs a few days later. The riots killed nearly 200 people, most of them ethnic Han Chinese, and left more than 1,700 wounded. Uighurs are not known to have previously carried out any suicide attacks.

The English-language China Daily said: "Terrorism is seeking to strike at the very heart of the nation."

“We strongly condemn the extremists who have planned and committed this terror assault. What they have done is against the common interests of all the various ethnicities in this country. Their way of asserting their will by resorting to terrorism will only make them the enemy of all Chinese people,” it said.

Meanwhile the Global Times daily described the perpetrators in an editorial as "outrageous and malicious".