Death and debris on Urumqi's streets, but in Beijing the blame game begins

Muslim exiles accused of incitement as UN backs minorities' right to protest.

The Chinese government and Uighur exile groups blamed each other after the deadliest ethnic violence in decades left at least 156 people dead and 800 injured in Urumqi, western China, on Sunday.

As armed police cleared bodies, debris and torched buses from the streets, the government launched a media offensive against Rebiya Kadeer, the leader of the exiled World Uighur Congress.

The Chinese authorities claim she and her supporters masterminded the riot that tore through the capital of the Xinjiang region on Sunday evening, the latest escalation of unrest between indigenous Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese settlers.

"Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on 5 July in order to incite, and websites ... were used to orchestrate the incitement and spread propaganda," Xinjiang's governor, Nur Bekri, said in a televised address.

"The unrest is a pre-empted, organised violent crime. It is instigated and directed from abroad, and carried out by outlaws," a central government statement noted.

China Central Television broadcast images of attacks on Han and Hui Chinese by angry Uighurs, bodies in the streets and bloodied victims being rushed to hospital. State media said the rioters burned 203 shops, 14 homes, 190 buses, two police cars and more than 60 other vehicles.

Overseas Uighur organisations deny incitement and accuse the security forces of stirring up violence by killing peaceful protesters rallying to honour two Uighurs beaten to death in a racial attack by Han Chinese last month.

The World Uighur Congress said scores of demonstrators were shotdead by riot police and crushed by armed personnel carriers in a heavy-handed attempt to disperse the crowd of 1,000 to 3,000, some of whom were waving Chinese flags.

Kadeer drew parallels between the treatment of Tibet and East Turkestan, as many Uighurs call their homeland.

"It is a common practice of the Chinese government to accuse me for any unrest in East Turkestan and His Holiness the Dalai Lama for any unrest in Tibet," she said. "The authorities should also acknowledge that their failure to take any meaningful action to punish the Chinese mob for the brutal murder of Uighurs is the real cause of this protest."

Others asked for international support for the Uighurs to peacefully protest against Chinese rule, racial discrimination and restrictions on freedom of religion.

Independent verification of the opposing claims was difficult. Many areas of the city were blocked and mobile and internet communications disrupted. China Mobile's phone service was suspended in the region "to help keep the peace and prevent the incident from spreading further," a customer service representative in Urumqi told Associated Press.

Little evidence was presented of incitement and the authorities have not released a casualty list.

Armed police have flooded the city, setting up road blocks and rounding up hundreds of suspects.

The police chief, Liu Yaohua, told the state-run Xinhua news agency that checkpoints had been set up to prevent 90 "key suspects" fleeing. He predicted the death toll would rise further.

The Urumqi municipal government issued emergency controls banning traffic in certain areas from 1am to 8am to "maintain social order in the city and guarantee the execution of duty by state organs".

In Geneva, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, urged governments to respect citizens' right to protest.

Roseann Rife, Amnesty International's deputy director for Asia and the Pacific, said: "The Chinese authorities must fully account for all those who died and have been detained. There has been a tragic loss of life and it is essential that an urgent independent investigation takes place to bring all those responsible for the deaths to justice."