The above video managed to escape the China censorship police and lists those in the cars as Uighurs. Just a note, I’ve been at that spot. To get to where that car is requires you to have negotiated around a few barriers, therefore not “an accident”. Witnesses also noted the apparent deliberate nature of the attack.
Via LA Times:
BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping and the six other top officials reportedly were at Tiananmen Square on Monday when a vehicle crashed and exploded nearby, leaving five dead.
Although there is no indication that the physical safety of the leaders, who were attending meetings inside the Great Hall of the People, was jeopardized, the apparent suicide attack so close to the epicenter of power rattled the Chinese government and has raised doubts about the effectiveness of its often-stifling security apparatus.
The three occupants of the car, suspected of being members of the Uighur ethnic minority, were killed along with two tourists, one a Filipina and the other a Chinese man. Thirty-eight people were injured.
“It is clear that China does not have a counter-terrorism capability. Their capabilities are very rudimentary, and they need to develop them,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert who has written widely on Uighur separatism. He attributed the attack to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a shadowy group based in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region.
Witnesses said that police were unable to stop the car, which traveled nearly 500 yards from an intersection before exploding.
Besides Xi, Premier Li Keqiang and the five other members of the Politburo Standing Committee — the innermost circle — were in the Great Hall of the People, on the west side of the square, abput 200 yards away. In the morning, they were attending a meeting with the China Women’s Federation and in the afternoon, a South African government delegation.
“The incident happened at Tiananmen Square while an important government conference was taking place. The suddenness of the incident alarmed the central government,” wrote a commentator on Duowei, an overseas Chinese news service with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The report said the investigation was assigned at the highest level to Fu Zhenghua, deputy public security minister, and that “many arrests are expected.”
The Chinese government has not called the incident a terror attack, although witness statements suggest that it was deliberate.
China was apparently so embarrassed by this incident, they went on a censorship tear, trying to wipe out all descriptions of this story and any implication that this could be a terrorist attack.
Via Reporters Without Borders:
Reporters Without Borders condemns the government’s censorship of yesterday’s incident in Tiananmen Square in which five people, including two tourists, died when car a drove into pedestrians and then caught fire.
“We deplore the way the authorities illegally detain journalists and confiscate their material,” Reporters Without Borders said. “In the era of new technologies and social networks, it is pointless using such methods to try to hush up such a major event. The authorities need to realise that media coverage of such events does not threaten them.”
Police arrested two AFP journalists – a photographer and a video-reporter – who tried to cover the event. They were released half an hour later and their equipment was returned to them, but their photographs and video footage had been deleted. Journalists with the BBC and apparently Sky News were also briefly arrested.
Every effort was made to censor information about the incident, which was the subject of a great deal of comment on the Internet, above all on social networks including Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Photos of the incident were removed from microblogs and Internet connection speeds were slowed right down, while pedestrian access to the square was blocked.
The police erected screens so that the gutted car could not be seen. News bulletins on the national television station CCTV did not mention the incident while other media mentioned it only briefly, calling it a “traffic incident.”
China is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet” and is ranked 173rd out of 179 countries in the 2013 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.