MCLC: explosions in Taiyuan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: explosions in Taiyuan
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (11/5/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/explosions-near-communist-pa
rty-building-in-china

Explosions Near Communist Party Building in China
By GERRY MULLANY

A series of small explosions occurred outside a Communist Party building
in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan on Wednesday, killing at least one
person and injuring eight others, the state media and government officials
reported.

A resident of a building facing the party offices told Xinhua, the
official news agency, that seven blasts had sent pedestrians fleeing.

The explosions came as security has been heightened in China after a sport
utility vehicle drove into pedestrians and then caught fire at the
entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing, killing five people, including
three in the vehicle, and injuring 40. Chinese officials characterized the
Oct. 28 attack as having been carried out by ethnic Uighur extremists from
the Xinjiang region, in western China.

The building where Wednesday’s explosions occurred was an office building
of the Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party, Xinhua said.
Taiyuan, with a population of more than four million, is the provincial
capital.

The police have yet to publicly identify any potential suspects. Shanxi’s
Public Security Bureau said in a message posted online that it is
conducting an “all-out investigation.”

Ball bearings were found at the scene of the explosion, leading to
suspicions that a homemade bomb was used, Xinhua reported. The blasts
struck around 7:40 a.m., the Shanxi Public Security Bureau said in a
notice <http://e.weibo.com/1790476443/AhriHbBRS>on its official microblog
account.

Images of smoke and damaged cars filled Chinese microblogs in the hours
after the explosion. The street in front of the party building, a main
thoroughfare home to several government buildings, was shut down after the
explosion, according to residents reached by phone.

Li Zhenzhen, who works in Taiyuan, said she passed by the scene after the
explosion. The police had already closed off the area and were preventing
passers-by from taking photographs, she said. “There were a lot of glass
shards on the ground,” Ms. Li said. “There was blood on the ground.”

The explosions struck just three days before the Chinese Communist Party’s
current Central Committee was scheduled to hold its third plenum, an
important meeting that is supposed to set China’s economic course over the
next decade.

China has seen at least one other bomb attack outside official buildings
in recent years. In 2011, two people were killed and seven injured after
three explosions around government offices in the city of Fuzhou in the
eastern province of Jiangxi. The man suspected of being the perpetrator,
who died in one of the blasts, was angered by the low compensation he had
received for the demolition of his home for highway construction.

Wen Yunchao, a Chinese human rights activist based in New York, has been
reposting images from the scene on Twitter under the hashtag #山西省委爆炸,
which means Shanxi Provincial Party Committee Explosion.