【路透社】3 Injured as Restaurant Explosion Rattles Beijing’s Nerves

青衣紫萝

3 Injured as Restaurant Explosion Rattles Beijing’s Nerves

By ANDREW JACOBS  Published: September 25, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/world/asia/26beijing.html?_r=1&ref=world

BEIJING — At least five people were injured Friday morning in what the authorities said was a gas explosion that leveled a restaurant in a busy shopping district in central Beijing.

The blast, coming less than a week before elaborate celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, rattled the capital, which has been under intense security restrictions.

The police said three of the injured, employees of the restaurant, Xinjiang Kashgar Delicacy City, were buried in the rubble of the two-story building. Witnesses, however, said several bystanders were also hurt.

The police immediately attributed the explosion to a canister of cooking gas.

Even if the explosion was an accident, its timing, and the fact that the restaurant was run by members of China’s Uighur minority, were not lost on residents of the neighborhood. A woman working at a nearby noodle shop called it “a bad coincidence.”

Relations between China’s Han majority and its Uighur Muslim minority have been especially tense since ethnic riots in the western Xinjiang autonomous region in July — disturbances that left nearly 200 people dead, most of them Han. And early this month, at least five people died after protesters clashed with the police in the regional capital of Urumqi.

In Beijing, Xinjiang-style restaurants, with their skewers of barbecued meat and flatbread, are ubiquitous and popular.

Residents and shop owners in Xinjiekou, the northwest Beijing neighborhood where the blast occurred, said they heard a loud roar around 9 a.m. and ran out to find bloodied passers-by in the street, a car covered in debris and the restaurant crumbled to the ground.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen something so horrible,” said a 40-year-old man who would give only his surname, Zhao. “I saw a body in the street and he wasn’t moving.”

Mr. Zhao, who lives in an alley near the restaurant, said he rented three rooms in his house to several people who worked at the restaurant and a branch not far away. “They’re all good, hard-working people,” he said, sitting outside his ramshackle house. “We’ve lived together for 10 years and we get along well. Clearly this was an accident.”

With a huge military parade planned for Thursday, the city has been awash in heavily armed security officers and volunteers, many of them retirees dressed in yellow golf shirts who stand sentinel on nearly every street corner. On Friday, neighborhood committee members wandered the old hutongs — the capital’s traditional alleyways — to ensure that every doorway had a Chinese flag overhead.

Despite the security presence, the festive atmosphere was marred by a spasm of violence last week.

In a neighborhood not far from Tiananmen Square, two people were stabbed to death and 14 wounded by an unemployed migrant worker who the police say went on a slashing spree while drunk. A few days later, a Frenchwoman was slightly wounded in an unrelated attack.

Immediately after the blast on Friday, a cordon of uniformed officers shut down the area and waved away journalists. Within two hours, a crane and a bulldozer were rumbling to the scene, followed by teams of cleanup workers dressed in fluorescent orange jackets. By noon, the street was reopened to buses and throngs of curiosity seekers who with their cellphones snapped photographs of shattered storefronts.