China executed three minority Muslim Uyghurs on Tuesday for the mass stabbing that left 31 people dead a year ago in an attack dubbed ‘China’s 9/11’ by state media.
Iskander Ehet, Turgun Tohtunyaz and Hasayn Muhhamad were put to death in an undisclosed location for “leading a terrorist organization and intentional homicide”, the Supreme People’s Court said in a microblog post following its review of the sentence.
Patigul Tohti escaped execution during sentencing in September because she was found to be pregnant after the group was rounded up by police.
China marked the one-year anniversary of the attack with wreaths and a short ceremony outside Kunming railway station on March 1.
Last year’s attack was China’s deadliest outside of restive Xinjiang for years in a country where the majority still supports use of the death penalty for serious crimes.
“For these people, it is accurate to say that sympathy for the executioner should never be tolerated,” wrote one user on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
Although the total number of people put to death in China continues to fall, according to estimates, the number of Uyghurs executed has risen to over 20 since authorities launched a ‘strike-hard’ campaign last May in response to escalating violence in Xinjiang.
Rights groups have complained that terrorism suspects are not receiving due process after China reinstated mass trials and admitted speeding up the sentencing in such cases.
“China is using the death penalty for political means in order to avoid the root cause of the problem,” Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman of the World Uyghur Congress, said in a statement after today’s executions. “The defendants did not get a fair trial and China used this event [in Kunming] to incite discrimination against Uyghurs.”