China Executes 3 Over Deadly Knife Attack at Train Station in 2014

BEIJING — A provincial court in southwestern China announced on Tuesday that the authorities had executed three men for carrying outa knife attack last year on civilians in a crowded train station in which 31 people were killed and 141 wounded.

The court, in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, said on its microblog that the men were Iskandar Ehet, Turgun Tohtunyaz and Hasayn Muhammad, which are ethnic Uighur names. Officials had said an eight-person group was responsible for the attack; four were shot dead at the scene and the others were arrested.

One female attacker, Patigul Tohti, is serving a life sentence, according to official news reports. She was pregnant at the time of her capture and so was spared the death sentence, which was imposed on the three remaining men after a quick trial in Kunming last September.

Many Chinese equated the killings to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. The United States State Department condemned the Kunming attack as an act of terrorism.

The assault took place last March during a period when violence between Uighurs and ethnic Han, the dominant group in China, had been on the rise in the far western region of Xinjiang. The Uighurs, a mostly Sunni Muslim group, consider part of that region their homeland. The Kunming attack was shocking to many Chinese because it took place in southwest China, far from Xinjiang and in a corner of the nation where few people had worried about the possibility of domestic terrorism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world/asia/china-executes-3-over-deadly-knife-attack-at-train-station-in-2014.html?ref=topics&_r=0