A man blew himself up with a bomb in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing yesterday afternoon. The blast, which slightly wounded a South Korean tourist, sparked a huge security alert, and officials closed the square and an adjoining metro station for the rest of the day.
Police said the man was a psychiatric patient called Li Xiangshan from the central Chinese province of Hubei, and that he took his own life. The statement did not say why he did it, or how the police determined that he committed suicide. Xinhua news agency described the man as a farmer, and said the blast occurred at 4 p.m.
Last night police lined the square on all sides to keep people away as a group of forensic experts examined the site of the explosion beside a lamp-post on the east side near the floodlit Monument to the People's Heroes.
Even if the bomber was deranged, the explosion is yet another Tiananmen-related embarrassment to the Chinese security police, who spend much of their time in the square pouncing on middle-aged practitioners of Falun Gong defying a ban by trying to perform exercises.
Security is especially difficult this week as some 170,000 people a day are arriving in Beijing by train after the spring holiday.
Tiananmen is the symbolic political centre of China, the place where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and where tanks crushed the student pro-democracy movement in 1989.
It is flanked by the Great Hall of the People, home to China's parliament, and nearby is the Zhongnanhai compound where the headquarters of the ruling Communist Party and the homes of China's top leaders are located.
The buildings around the square remained opened to tourists last night, and the daily flag-lowering ritual went ahead as usual at sunset, but police would allow no one on to the newly-paved plaza and checked the identity papers of pedestrians. Public Security Bureau officials are always on heightened alert for bombs during the annual meeting of the National People's Congress, which opens on March 8th in the Great Hall of the People.
Chinese citizens use the parliamentary session to air a host of grievances ranging from unemployment to corruption.
The fact that the bomber was in a psychiatric hospital does not necessarily mean that he was mentally unstable. Some political offenders, including members of Falun Gong, have been committed to mental institutions for their defiance. However, all Falun Gong demonstrations have involved passive resistance rather than violence.
There have been a number of suicide bombings in Beijing over the years blamed by authorities on disgruntled citizens. In 1997 at least two people were killed by a home-made device which exploded on a crowded bus.
The only group which has recently used bombs in China is the separatist movement in remote Xinjiang province. Falun Gong is a spiritual movement based on breathing exercises and elements of Buddhism and Taoism. It has been banned as an "evil cult" which has encouraged ill people to refuse conventional medicine.
The US would not oppose China's participation in the Group of Eight (G8) summit this July if Japan decides to invite Beijing, the US ambassador to Japan, Mr Thomas Foley, said yesterday.