A high-ranking military officer in western China was sacked days after a deadly attack in the heart of Beijing, suggesting that the incident may have rattled China's leadership enough to precipitate a political fallout.
On 28 October a white Mercedes-Benz sport-utility vehicle ploughed through a crowd in Tiananmen Square, crashed into a guardrail and exploded. The driver, his two passengers and two tourists died and 40 other people were injured.
General Peng Yong was removed from the Communist party standing committee in Xinjiang, the restive western region that was home to the driver, the state-run Xinjiang Daily said in a front-page article on Sunday.
He was replaced by Liu Lei, another high-ranking military official. The paper did not give explicit reasons for Peng's removal.
China's official newswire, Xinhua, called the crash a "carefully planned, organised and premeditated" attack and said authorities had arrested five suspects within hours. It identified the driver as Usmen Hasan, a 33-year-old ethnic Uighur from Xinjiang, and the passengers as his wife, Gulkiz Gini, and mother, Kuwanhan Reyim. It said that police found machetes and a flag showing "extreme religious content" in the vehicle's charred remains.
Xinjiang is a massive sprawl of desert, mountains and forests that borders eight countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan and India on China's westernmost frontier. It is home to nine million native Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group which, according to advocacy groups, suffers from religious repression and economic marginalisation as the region is flooded by majority Han Chinese. Ethnic tensions occasionally flare into violence; in 2009 about 200 people died amid riots in the regional capital, Urumqi.
China has heightened security throughout Xinjiang since the attack, according to media reports. "Flights between Xinjiang and inland regions are currently under more stringent security checking," reported the state-run Global Times newspaper.
Citing local police, the BBC reported that security levels were raised and police were visiting "sensitive religious families". The Wall Street Journal reported that Hasan's home town, Lukqun, was in lockdown. Local authorities could not be reached for comment on Monday.
A raft of state media reports and editorials have cast the crash as an act of terrorism. Last week China's top security official, Meng Jianzhu, blamed the attack on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Xinjiang-based Islamic fundamentalist group with ostensible ties to al-Qaida. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Advocacy groups have disputed the official version of events, claiming the group lacks the resources to carry out an effective terrorist attack. "If the Uighurs did it, I believe they did it out of desperation because there is no channel for the Uighur people to seek redress for any kind of injustice they had suffered under Chinese rule," Rebiya Kadeer, leader of the international advocacy group World Uighur Congress (WUC), told Reuters. The Chinese government considers the WUC a terrorist organisation.
Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: "We have to recognise there is a terrorism issue, and there is political violence in Xinjiang. But at the same time, it is true that China is instrumentalising this terrorising to suppress the Uighur people [and] deny them basic rights."
Bequelin said Chinese authorities were unwilling to admit that the centre of the terrorism threat lay within the country's borders. "If it's located inside of China, you have to ask yourself, is it because we have terrorists in Xinjiang? Which leads you to: why do these people have grievances? Which then opens up the whole issue of why Chinese policies are making Uighurs feel like strangers in their own land."
