China executes three convicts of Kunming Railway Station massacre

Beijing, Mar 24 (EFE).- Three people convicted for an attack in a railway station, in which 33 people died on Mar. 1, 2014, were executed Tuesday, state-controlled Xinhua news agency reported.

Iskandar Ehet, Turgun Tohtunyaz and Hasayn Muhammad were accused by the Chinese government of belonging to terrorist groups with ties to jihadist networks.

Though the nature of execution was not revealed, shooting is the most commonly used method for carrying out such sentences in China, while lethal injections too are being phased in for the purpose.

The three convicts were a part of an eight-member group that indiscriminately attacked passengers and passers-by with knives at the Kunming railway station in China’s Yunnan province.

The police had killed four assailants during the incident and arrested the other four, of whom three were executed Tuesday while the fourth one -then-pregnant Patigul Tohti- received a life sentence during their trial in September last year.

The assailants were Uighurs, an ethnic minority of Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, in the northwest, which frequently witnesses conflict between security forces and pro-independence groups.

Xinjiang, bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, is inhabited by several Muslim ethnicities like the Uighures, from where, according to authorities, terrorist groups with links to Al Qaeda and Islamic State, IS, operate.

For months, the reasons for the attack in Yunnan remained unknown.

However, subsequent investigations revealed that the area had become a frequent transit point for Uighurs who wanted to travel to the Middle East and join IS.

In December, China’s official ‘Global Times’ daily reported that around 300 Chinese nationals were fighting in IS ranks in Iraq and Syria, while in February, it said that three Uighurs had been killed by the terrorist organization for trying to flee. EFE

abc/mr-sr/sc/amg

Category: Daily Witness, National