Beijing has released a detailed breakdown of the casualties from last month's deadly ethnic unrest in Xinjiang between Uygurs and Han Chinese.
It said civilians accounted for the overwhelming majority of the 197 deaths and most of them were Han.
Hou Hanmin, spokesman for the Xinjiang regional government, said yesterday that 156 'innocent civilians' were killed in the ethnic clashes and of these 134 were Han Chinese, 11 were from the Hui ethnic group, 10 were Uygurs and one was from the Man ethnic group. Mr Hou denied foreign media reports that an associate professor from the Uygur group at Beijing's Minzu University had been detained for his involvement in the Urumqi clashes.
Beijing launched a fresh propaganda attack on the World Uygur Congress (WUC) and its exiled leader, Rebiya Kadeer, yesterday, accusing it of using intelligence agents to spread false information about an ethnic brawl at a Guangdong factory, which preceded the violence in Xinjiang.
On China Central Television's 7pm news, the central government's main news programme, an arrested Uygur told how he had helped the congress fan the clashes in Urumqi on July 5.
Lurban Khayum, 32, was described as a chef at a Muslim restaurant in Guangzhou and an intelligence agent of the congress.
