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Workers feel lucky to be alive after chaos

By Cui Jia and Cui Xiaohuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-07 07:08

With his automobile shop in Urumqi razed to the ground, store manager Guo Jianxin returned to the wreckage after fleeing with coworkers to a nearby hill, still frightened and shaking on Sunday.

"Fortunately I managed to escape the attacks," said the Geely car store general manager, hours after violence broke out in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Click for video

Photo released by police shows rioters smash and overturn a police car in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on July 5, 2009. [chinadaily.com.cn]

Amid the riots that engulfed Urumqi, where at least 140 were reportedly killed, many store owners of various ethnic groups in the area said they felt lucky just to be alive after hiding and escaping the chaos.

"It was about 10 pm and I saw rioters outside," Guo said. "I asked more than 20 store workers to help protect the shop, but there were too many rioters ... more than 100, holding knives, wooden batons and stones," said Guo, an ethnic Hui.

Failing to dissuade the rioters from entering the store, Guo led his workers up a hill beside the car shop.

The three-story building was ablaze; more than 30 new cars were torched. One worker, whose arm was broken, was sent to hospital.

On the other side of the street was another store owned by a Han couple. They said that when they saw rioters on the streets after 10 pm, they immediately shut the door and escaped.

When they returned, the couple found that the shop was torched. Some 20,000 yuan ($2,940) and a camera in the counter were gone.

Next door a young worker from the southwestern Sichuan province was beaten to death, the couple said.

"I never thought I would come out alive," said a cigarette and liquor store owner standing in front of his empty store with shattered windows Monday. The owner said the store was robbed by rioters on Sunday night.

"The violence from the rioters was getting out of hand around 10 pm, so my sister-in-law I and decided to hide under the bed in the stockroom," said the owner.

He also said that he heard the rioters smashing windows to enter the locked store.

"We've been hiding under the bed for three hours, we thought we were going to die," the owner recalled.

In the hospital

The Urumqi People's Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Urumqi, took in 291 victims of the riot.

Among them, 233 were Han, 39 were Uygurs, while the rest were from other ethnic minorities such as Hui and Kazak, said Wang Faxing, president of the hospital.

"Most victims suffered injuries to the head," Xing Haitao, the deputy chief of the emergency department, said Monday.

Seventeen of the patients died later.

In the aftermath of the violence, relatives of the injured expressed their anger about the rioters.

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