DHARAMSHALA, March 5: A woman reportedly set herself ablaze at Tiananmen Square as 12th National People’s Congress (NPC) of China commenced at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday, two days after violent attack in a train station left 29 people dead and over a hundred injured in Kunming city.
Sichuan based news website 64tianwang posted pictures showing puffs of smoke and residual foam of fire extinguisher at the northern end of the square manned by several security guards as Chinese premiere Le Qi kiang spoke a few meters away at the opening of the National People’s Congress.
Police immediately extinguished the fire and removed the woman, in her forties according to eyewitnesses, from the scene.
“I had a glance that four, five men trying to put out a fire,” a woman from Jilin province was quoted by the South China Morning Post as saying. “It all happened so quickly.”
Witnesses said police quickly moved to check bystanders’ phones, ordering visitors to delete photos and emails of the scene.
The eyewitness accounts come amid tight security on the first day of the annual session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People on the western side of Tiananmen Square, reported the SCMP.
In October last year, five people including two tourists were killed and 38 injured when a car rammed through barricades in front of Tiananmen Square’s gate tower before bursting into flames. The incident took place days ahead of the Communist Party’s third plenum.
“There are video cameras everywhere. Uniformed police officers stand at the ready, and not-so-plainclothes officers make their patrols (the headsets are a give away). Red fire extinguishers dot the landscape, ready to be deployed should anybody try to set themselves on fire. Today, with the NPC and CPPCC under way, and the Kunming attack on everyone’s mind, the security presence felt even stronger, with heavily guarded checkpoints set up around the square’s vast perimeter. At many such stations, shields and black batons lay at the ready,” Emily Rauhala, Times’ Beijing Correspondent, writes.
