Local residents believe that an attempt by the authorities in Hotan, Xinjiang, to gradually ban local Uygur women from wearing black veils and traditional Islamic black outfits was one of the main triggers of a deadly attack at a local police station on Monday.
A local government spokesman confirmed that an official campaign had been launched in recent months against a new trend of wearing black veils along with black robes - similar to the Islamic robes worn by the 'black widow' attackers in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya - although those in Xinjiang are not exactly burqas.
The trend was alarming because such outfits became popular only after the riots in July 2009 - which claimed 197 lives and injured about 2,000 - and they are not traditional Uygur attire, the spokesman said yesterday.
Maimaiti, a street vendor who was among dozens of eyewitnesses of the violence, said that all the attackers were Uygur men aged from 20 to 35. They were carrying cardboard boxes with weapons inside and walked towards the Nuerbage police station before they hacked a Uygur police assistant to his death at the front gate and stormed into the station on Monday morning.
'At the top of his angry voice, with an accent from either Kashgar or Aksu, one of them shouted some slogans, of which I recognised only some words, against the recent ban on women's black veils and 'Arbaryi', a dark robe dressing a woman head-to-toe in black,' said the middle-aged man. He said the attacker repeated this aspiration at least three times.
What Maimaiti said was echoed by another witness, who declined to be named for fear of political reprisal. Giving no details, the ethnic Uygur man said in broken Putonghua that he had heard similar slogans about the restriction of women's black veils.