Six more get death penalty

• Source: Global Times
• [02:39 October 16 2009]
• Comments

Police officers stand guard outside the Intermediate People's Court in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on Oct. 12, 2009. Six men who were convicted of murder and other crimes in the July 5 riot in Xinjiang were sentenced Monday to death after a first-instance trial, and another man was jailed for life.(Xinhua/Wang Fei)

By Liang Chen

Fourteen more people, including two from the Han ethnic group, were Thursday given penalties ranging from death to many years in jail, for murder and other crimes in the deadly riots in July in the city of Urumqi.

This is the first time that rioters of the Han ethnic group caught in the Urumqi unrest were held responsible, following the sentencing of six people of the Uygur ethnic group to the death penalty and another to life imprisonment three days ago.

Last Saturday, local courts in South China's Guangdong Province sentenced one Han man to death and another to life in prision over a toy factory brawl that left two Uygur workers dead.

While overseas dissidents criticized the verdicts of fulfilling the government's "political need," people in China applauded the fact that the criminals "got what they deserved" under the law, whether they were Han or Uygur.

Of the two Han people sentenced, Han Junbo was sentenced to death. His accomplice, Liu Bo, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court.

Han was found to have beaten an Uygur with a steel bar, and Liu helped beat the Uygur's body with a stick and a bar, causing his death, according to the Xinhua News Agency.