A riot is said to have taken place at a Chinese toll station after an Islamic cleric reportedly got beaten by the staff during a row.
Angry Muslim residents in Tangshan, northern China’s Hebei Province, apparently gathered at Pingwali Toll Station after hearing about the incident and wanted to demand justice.
The protesters also demanded the armed SWAT officers, who were sent to control the situation, kneel in front of during the riot, according to a YouTube video shared by Radio Free Asia.
Muslim residents reportedly mobbed the Pingwali station in northern China on September 2 after hearing an Islamic cleric got beaten by the staff during an argument
The incident appears to have been be censored by the Chinese news authority. Videos and reports discussing the event have been removed from the internet after they started appearing during the weekend.
According to Chinese-language news websites based outside of mainland China, such as US-based Radio Free Asia and Hong Kong-based on.cc, the riot occurred in the evening of September 2 in Tangshan, Hebei Province.
The riot was said to involve the Hui people, an ethnic minority group in China which follows the religion of Islam.
The government of the Guye District in Tangshan released a statement on the night of September 2 confirming the incident, reported Radio Free Asia.
The protesters were said to be Hui people, an ethnic minority group in China which follows the religion of Islam. In the file photo above, Hui women read the Koran in Arabic in a classroom
The statement said the riot started because Yang Zhenfeng, an akhoond, had been hit by a worker at the toll station during an argument.
It was said that Yang and two other people were passing the Pingwali Toll Station in a car and there was a long queue, so the party of three tried to jump the queue through a closed gate.
Online accounts said the group claimed they were allowed to do so because they had religious privilege, according to on.cc.
A separate statement from Guye District said an argument broke out between Yang and a toll gate worker, named Wang Hao, who hit Yang in the head. A woman travelling with Yang was said to sustain nose bleeding.
The incident apparently triggered anger among the local Muslim residents who gathered and mobbed the toll station on China’s 205 National Highway and caused traffic congestion.
Various YouTube videos believed to be of the riot showed furious Hui protesters throwing rock towards SWAT officers who were armed with shields.
The riot is said to have occurred in Tangshan (pictured), a major city in Hebei Province
It appears the news has been censored on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter.
Both statements from Guye District could no longer be found on the internet. The search word ‘Tangshan toll station’ was banned on Weibo ‘due to relevant laws and policies’.
Hui is one of China’s most prominent ethnic minority groups and the most wide-spread one.
There are about 10 million Hui people in China. Most of them live in north-west part of the country, especially in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
Tension between China’s dominant Han people and Muslim population have run high in the past decade.
Clashes between the two groups have been observed in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang, where the Islamic Uighur people live.
On the other hand, the Chinese authority has launched a number of controversial bans in Xinjiang in the past year, such as preventing men from having ‘abnormal’ beards or woman from wearing veils. Uighur teachers have also been banned from teaching in their native language at school.
News reports related to the Muslim population are regularly censored in China out of fear of social unrest.