Nation mourns Kunming victims

eople mourn the victims of the terrorist attack at the railway station in Kunming, Yunnan province on Sunday night. Twenty-nine people were killed, and more than 130 wounded in the attack on Saturday night. Photo: Yang Jingjie/GT

Hundreds of mourners gathered on Sunday outside Kunming Railway Station, scene of a brutal terror attack that left at least 29 dead and more than 130 injured on Saturday evening.

While much of the scene had been cleaned up by Sunday, people started to gather around 9 pm outside the station in Yunnan province, lighting candles and laying flowers.

Chinese law enforcers, who have laid the blame for the bloody attack on separatists from Northwest China's restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, are tracking suspects who stormed the station armed with knives at 9:20 pm Saturday, stabbing and slashing people at random outside the station and in the booking hall and the waiting rooms.

Witnesses talked of around 10 masked people dressed in black wielding long knives and stabbing indiscriminately.

"People were crying and running out of the station, many with bloody faces and hands, some falling down to the ground," Wu Bo, a young man who was walking by the station, told the Global Times.

He helped some of the victims to nearby hospitals, including two children. He was at the square on Sunday night again joining the mourners.

Other heroic acts of people risking their lives to aid the victims have been reported.

When a man and woman wearing masks chased Qi Wen, who was at the station seeing his family off to Anyang, Henan province, a cellphone store owner let him and a dozen other people into his store, locking them inside.

The terrorists pointed their knives at them, then left, Qi told the Beijing News. The mother of a friend of Qi, who was also at the station, was stabbed in the back, he said.

At least four attackers were shot at the scene, and one woman was arrested. Police are seeking at least five more suspects who fled.

The attack, just two days before the country's annual parliamentary meeting, or two sessions, in Beijing, was apparently aimed at causing as much publicity and panic as possible, a senior anti-terrorism official from Beijing told the Global Times.

Yunnan Provincial No.3 People's Hospital, the closest to the station, received 29 of the most seriously wounded, most having been stabbed multiple times to the chest or stomach.

A woman, who is six months pregnant, was stabbed in the chest and was unconscious when sent to the hospital. Her condition is serious, but the baby seems unharmed, doctors told the Global Times.

Three people are in "very serious" condition, including one police officer, the hospital said.

A nurse surnamed Wu told the Global Times that he saw five victims had already died by the time they arrived at the hospital on Saturday, including one police officer and two auxiliary officers.

Around 3:50 pm on Sunday, a Global Times reporter witnessed heavily armed police detain two suspects behind Yunnan Horizon Hotel in central Kunming. The two suspects apparently had Xinjiang identification documents and tried to hide behind a building. Police said that they were carrying something "very abnormal," but could not yet conclude if they were connected to the terror attack.

This is the largest terrorist attack since the July 5 riot in Xinjiang's capital city of Urumqi in 2009, in which nearly 200 civilians were killed by Uyghurs believed to be separatists.

There were at least seven terror attacks in Xinjiang last year, which mainly targeted law enforcement. But three Uyghurs ploughed a vehicle into the crowds near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in October, killing two and wounding nearly 40. Authorities said the attackers were related to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an international terrorist organization.

The choice of Yunnan for the attack may be connected to the ease of crossing the borders to neighboring countries, as Xinjiang has forbidding weather and landscapes and strict border controls, experts said.

In 2009, 20 Chinese citizens were caught by a neighboring country. Police found three of them were wanted members of a Uyghur terrorist group, which launched an attack against armed police in Kashi in 2008 shortly before the Beijing Olympic Games, leaving 16 dead.

An anti-narcotics official told the Global Times that ETIM members have also increasingly been reliant on drug-trafficking to fund their movement. Yunnan and the neighboring Golden Triangle are seeing more drug traffickers from Xinjiang.