Summary
It is still unclear exactly what transpired Oct. 28 near Beijing's Tiananmen Square, but the incident appears to have been a deliberate attack and occurs in the lead-up to the Communist Party Central Committee's third plenary session, a symbolic event in which the Party is poised to launch major economic reforms. According to Chinese media and Reuters, which provided only scant details, a car drove onto the sidewalk and caught fire in front of the Tiananmen Rostrum at 12:05 p.m. local time. Pictures circulating on the social media site Weibo show a light-colored SUV with a roof rack and the back half in flames sitting near the bridge to the Forbidden City.
Analysis
An eyewitness claimed to have heard an explosion, but the pictures show the vehicle and surrounding structures intact. The fire itself may have been caused by a ruptured fuel tank from the crash or confrontation with police, or, in this case it appears likely, from incendiary materials. This tourist site is always packed with crowds. Xinhua implied that the car drove into a crowd just in front of where it stopped, but rumors claim that the car entered the sidewalk several blocks earlier. The original report of 11 injured may support the former claim, but the latest reports of two dead tourists (a Filipino woman and a man from Guangdong) and 38 injuries reflect the busy site and could support the rumor that the car drove down a longer length of the sidewalk. Three people in the vehicle were also killed, according to EastMoney.com.
Security officials have evacuated and closed off Tiananmen Square. A nearby subway station stopped running at the request of police, local transport officials told Reuters. While the government has expanded security checkpoints and barricades at the site over the past several years, security does not seem to have intensified at the site prior to this incident. Sources say that basic bag checks and searches were not conducted with any special urgency, and the number of manned checkpoints, uniformed and plainclothes police seemed routine. That security does not seem to have intensified at the site prior to the incident suggests that there was no intelligence on impending attacks or that any such intelligence was not linked to this location.
Without information on the individuals in the car, it is too soon to identify culprits and motivation. First, the report that three people were in the vehicle suggests that the incident was not a lone wolf attack. However, small, low-capability attacks in China often originate with individuals who make use of whatever tools they have at hand, such as gasoline, knives or, in this case, a car. These attackers can be Han Chinese citizens, often aggrieved over government land appropriations or other personal, local injustices, and targeting public locations. Still, the intensity of the fire in this case suggests that it was an attack or suicide and that an incendiary device was involved.
Second, the incident could have been a self-immolation or low-capability terrorist attack by Uighur or (less likely) Tibetan militants. On one hand, the incident is reminiscent of one in Beijing in 2009 in which three Uighurs in a car drove up on a busy Wangfujing sidewalk in Beijing and set themselves alight with gasoline. They were reportedly visiting the city to petition the government. On the other hand, a recent series of police raids in Xinjiang have emphasized a heightened security threat from small cells of Uighurs radicalized and "trained" by online media -- if this incident should prove to be an attack, the low-capability and soft target would match with this sort of small grassroots cell. And indeed, the second edition of Inspire, the English-language jihadist magazine, included a tutorial on using a vehicle in grassroots attacks in its Open Source Jihad section.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the Communist Party Central Committee's third plenary session is coming up in November. Tiananmen Square obviously remains a potent symbol for disaffected or anti-regime elements to target. While this incident could have been an accident in which a car lost control and crashed through the perimeter, this hypothesis seems unlikely given the three people in the vehicle, the symbolic location and timing.
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