Knife fight in southern China sparks concerns of ethnic tensions

Five people were hacked to death, and one person was fatally shot by police following a dispute at a market Friday in southern China, local authorities said.

Armed police officers patrol an ethnic Uighur area in Kashgar, in Xinjiang province. Reuters

The killings in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, come two weeks after a knife attack in another southern city involving members of the ethnic Uighur minority from the far west region of Xinjiang, raising concerns the latest violence was ethnically motivated. But reports from Changsha indicate it stemmed from a dispute that erupted between two food sellers. The knife fight left one of them dead, police in Changsha said in an online statement. The other fled and hacked at four more people while on the run before he was shot dead by police, police said. Two of the four people died at the scene and the other two died in a hospital, police said. A stream of online news updates on the attack slowed Friday afternoon with earlier posts by local media removed from their microblogs, suggesting ethnic sensitivities following the earlier 1 March knife attack that killed 29 and wounded more than 140 at a train station in Nanjing. The Chinese government blamed the attack at the train station on Xinjiang separatists, and the attackers were widely believed to be members of the Turkish-speaking Muslim Uighur minority from the region. Online news updates that said the food sellers in the latest attack were Uighurs have been removed, but an eyewitness — who gave only his last name Chen — told The Associated Press that the stand operators were Uighurs selling ethnic foods. AP