BEIJING — China has executed nine people for their participation in the country's worst ethnic rioting in decades, an official news service announced Monday in a terse bulletin.
The report did not disclose the identity of those executed or the date the sentence was carried out, but it is presumed that most of those executed were Uighurs. Once the dominant ethnic group in China's Xinjiang region, Uighurs were blamed for the July 5 riots in Urumqi in which 197 people, mostly Han Chinese, were killed and 1,600 injured.
The announcement, coming in the run-up to President Obama's first trip to China, will likely add to the clamor of voices demanding that he speak up more forcefully on human rights.
"The fact that Chinese authorities had the audacity to carry out these executions on the eve of President Barack Obama's visit to China displays their utter disregard for international human rights standards," Rebiya Kadeer, the Washington-based leader of the World Uyghur Congress, said Monday in a statement.