Fire on China bus kills 1; probe says arson

HONG KONG -- A fire aboard a bus in western China on Monday killed one person and injured 19 others, a municipal press office said, and authorities said police think the man who died in the accompanying explosion was responsible for igniting the fire.

The state-run Xinhua news agency said an explosion had occurred aboard a bus in Yibin, a city in Sichuan province about 130 miles southwest of Chongqing, and that a 12-year-old girl aboard the bus had smelled gasoline right before the blast.

The Yibin government said on an official website this morning that a preliminary investigation by police shows that the blast was caused by arson.

The newspaper Beijing News posted photos on its website of what appeared to be three injured people lying on the sidewalk near a bus, while a fourth person, lying on a stretcher, was being treated next to the front door of the bus by two nurses and a firefighter.

Beijing News said the photos were from The Western China Metropolis Daily. At least one window of the bus appeared to be missing, but others were intact; the exterior of the vehicle did not appear charred or otherwise damaged, while the interior was too dark to be seen clearly in the photos.

The Yibin municipal press office said in a statement that a fire had occurred aboard a bus at 4:50 p.m. Monday and that traffic officers, firefighters, medical workers and other personnel had responded. The statement did not provide a possible cause of the fire.

The official People's Daily reported earlier in the day that Beijing would begin requiring people to register before buying gasoline and to explain their purpose, to "prevent lawbreakers from using gasoline to create disturbances."

China has had three attacks since March 1 in which one or more individuals wielding knives have assaulted people at train stations. In the second of the attacks, on April 30, two people also detonated a small bomb at the train station in Urumqi, a city in the far west of China.

Authorities have linked the first attack, in Kunming on March 1, and the second attack to people with names that appear to be Uighur. Nearly half of the 22 million people in the Xinjiang region of western China are Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic group, and many feel dispossessed under Chinese rule, with the tensions sometimes leading to outbreaks of violence.

Few details have been released about the third attack, when six people were injured last Tuesday at the train station in Guangzhou. Authorities have responded to the attacks by stepping up police patrols at train stations and issuing guns to more of those patrols.

China has had a broader safety problem in its bus system that is unrelated to terrorism. In one of the worst accidents, 41 people were killed when flammable materials in personal luggage caught fire on an intercity bus in 2011.

An unemployed man who tried to kill himself in June by setting off an explosion aboard a bus ended up starting a fire that killed 47 people in Xiamen in southeastern China.

The bus explosion Monday could create further difficulties for authorities in a country where car ownership is still low by international standards and most people still rely on mass transit.

A bus explosion in Shanghai in May 2008 killed at least three people and wounded at least 12, according to state media reports, and bombs exploded two months later aboard two buses in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, killing at least two people.

The Turkestan Islamic Party, which claims to be a jihadist group working for the liberation of Xinjiang, put out a video five days after the Kunming attacks, claiming responsibility for the explosions in Kunming and Shanghai. Chinese officials said their investigations showed that the group was not responsible for the attacks, but it was unclear who had carried them out.

Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/13/2014

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