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Officers sacked after violent street protest

By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-22 10:02

Three traffic police assistants have been sacked after they sparked a mass protest in which one thousand people poured onto the streets and officers were pelted with bricks.

The incident began in Baiyin city, Gansu province, between traffic police and a cyclist who officials say "failed to stop" at a red light around noon.

According to an anonymous eyewitness, the traffic police and their assistants "pulled Zhang Bing off his bike and beat him until blood was all over his face." Zhang only quarreled with the police when they tried to take him away to wash off the blood, the source said on China News Net.

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In the Baiyin government's version of events, Zhang is a jobless 21-year-old who "agitated the crowd by jumping onto a police car, claiming to be a student who had been beaten by the officers".

As a crowd of up to 1,000 gathered and more police arrived, a confrontation between protesters and police broke out. Ten officers and government officials were injured by brick-throwing protestors, the government said.

After that, "about 200 protesters surrounded the county government building", according to the official story, which says the crowd did not disperse until midnight.

Nanjing confrontation

Officers from the urban management corps of Nanjing, capital city of Jiangsu province, are in the spotlight after causing the city's largest university unrest in years.

The officers, whose identity in recent years has been synonymous with brutality against the poor and often unregistered street vendors, allegedly attacked a group of students who set up sidewalk stalls in the city's Jiangning district on Monday about 6pm.

Claiming a female student was injured in the incident, thousands of outraged students from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics took to the streets and cut off traffic for nearly five hours.

The students carried slogans in both Chinese and English claiming to protest through Gandhian "nonviolent noncooperation", and used cellphone cameras to take photos which were uploaded and widely circulated across online forums.

The photos showed students approach dozens of traffic and riot police with signs reading "help vulnerable social groups and construct a harmonious society" - a vow of the central government since 2004.

The line of riot police, who arrived on scene at about 9 pm, was at one point broken through by protestors, according to eyewitnesses who recalled the incident online on early Tuesday.

The stalemate ended at close to 11 pm, when the students gradually began to leave, witnesses say.

But Nanjing police, in a statement to China Daily, denied students set up stalls on Monday night in the square, or that anyone was beaten or verbally abused.