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200 to face trial for China riot

AP, Beijing
More than 200 people are expected to go on trial this week for their involvement in sectarian riots last month that lolled nearly 200 people in China's eastern region of Xinjiang, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday.
The trials will take place in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and the site of China's worst ethnic violence in decades, in which another 1,700 people were injured, the China Daily reported. The rioting pitted indigenous Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs against members of Cltina's dominant Han ethnic group who have migrated to the region in large numbers over recent decades.
Tensions in the city remain high with security forces keeping a wary eye out for renewed violence.
China Daily said security will be further boosted around the time of the trials to prevent revenge attacks or assaults by Uihgur radicals that Beijing blames for carrying out a low-level insurgency against Chinese rule in the region.
Officials have offered little direct information about the investigation into the riots that broke out July 5 after police stopped an initially peaceful protest by Uighur youths. Uighurs then smashed windows. burned cars and attacked Han. Two days later, the Han took to the streets and staged retaliatory attacks.
Details about the resulting crackdown have filtered out mainly through the official media, which has offered fractured and sometimes contradictory information about numbers of arrests and preparations for trials.
An official reached at the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court on Monday confirmed the court would be handling cases related to the riots, but said he had did not know when they would go to trial. The official, who works in the court's political section, gave only his surname, Ren, as is common among Chinese officials.
Authorities have repeatedly, accused exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer of fomenting the violence, but have offered little proof to back up their claims.
The accusation has been
denied by Kadeer, and in a recent interview with the magazine Foreign Policy, the 62-year-old US-based activist said China was setting her up as a scapegoat. While saying she opposed the violence, Kadeer said the riot was an outgrowth of pent-up anger among Uighurs, many of whom believe Chinese policies are diluting their culture and marginalizing them economically.
"Instead of blaming me for everything, (the Chinese authorities) should just stop suppressing and stop killing people," said Kadeer. a former businesswoman who served six years in a Chinese prison on charges of endangering state security before going into exile in the US in 2005.
China Daily last week reported that more than 3,300 items of physical evidence had been collected in the investigation into last month’s violence, including bricks and clubs stained with blood. The evidence also includes 91 video clips and 2,169 photographs, it said.
A total of 197 people were killed in the riot, most of them believed to be Han Chinese.
Most of the arrests of riot suspects were made in Urumqi and Kashgar, a city in southern Xinjiang with a heavy concentration of Uighur people, the newspaper quoted an unidentified Urumqi prosecutor as saying.
The charges range from vandalizing public property to murder, the China Daily said.
Although security in Urumqi is already high, "a drastic increase in security is expected in the whole city," the newspaper said, especially around the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court. Armed police are already conducting around-the-clock patrols in the area.
The newspaper did not give a breakdown on how many Uighurs and how many Han would go on trial, but it said more than 170 Uighur and 20 Han lawyers had been assigned to the suspects.
The China Daily said 718 people had been detain^ pp. suspicion of taking part in the rioting. Earlier reports said at least 1,600 were detained. It wasn't clear whether any had been released.