SHAOGUAN, Guangdong, July 6 (Xinhua) -- The Xinjiang Uygur workers injured in a toy factory brawl in south China's Guangdong Province condemned the riot in their hometown, where at least 140 people were killed.

    "The rioters used our injuries as an excuse for their violence," said Atigul Turdi, 24, who was injured when she was running out of the scene of the fight on June 26 in Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan City, Guangdong. "I firmly opposed the violence in the name of taking revenge for us."

    Two Uygur workers died and 60 Xinjiang Urgur workers were injured in the brawl. Then riot organizers started posting calls on Internet forums for demonstrations in Urumqi, the Xinjiang regional capital.

    "I believe the government will handle the brawl appropriately," Turdi said. "Why did the rioters destroy our beautiful and peaceful Xinjiang region in such cruel manners?"

BEIJING -Trying to work out what on earth happened Sunday night in Urumqi, where the government says that at least 140 people died in a riot, is proving about as hard as getting an interview with President Hu Jintao.

The key question is: Who died? Muslim Uighur demonstrators, cut down by the police, as Uighur exile groups claim? Or innocent Han Chinese bystanders, butchered by a mob of Uighurs, as the government-owned media are making out?

Getting any Uighurs in Urumqi to talk on Monday was impossible. Their Internet access had been cut off, most of their phones, too, and those whom foreign journalists reached were too terrified of the government to say anything.

Xinjiang, an allegedly autonomous region, is the hardest place I have ever worked. The atmosphere of repression is Stalinist. For a week last year I tried to gauge ordinary people's feelings there about the authorities. Not one person I spoke to would give his real name, and most whom I approached wanted nothing to do with me.

While reports of unrest in Tibet frequently grab headlines around the world, little attention is given to what several human rights groups have dubbed China's "other Tibet".

China's frontier to Central Asia, the vast western region of Xinjiang has in recent years seen escalating ethnic tensions and the imposition of a heavy military presence to suppress what Beijing says is a growing terrorist threat.

From Beijing's point of view, Xinjiang has always been a part of China.

But while the region has a history of domination at the hands of the Chinese, Beijing's claim overlooks long gaps where the region merged with Central Asian and Turkic states.

To this day, most Uighurs feel more culturally aligned with the Turkic peoples to the west, rather than Beijing to the east.  

Demonstrators hurled rocks Monday at the Chinese embassy in The Hague and about 60 people were detained in a protest that followed deadly unrest in China's Xinjiang region, police said.

Rocks and cobble stones were hurled at the embassy building and several windows were broken.

Police spokeswoman Chantal Marges said "about 60 people" were held for failing to follow police orders.

Rival protesters took to the streets again on Tuesday, defying Chinese government efforts to lock down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region after bloody clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. <...>

Police fired tear gas on Tuesday at Han Chinese protesters armed with clubs, lead pipes, shovels and hoes, news reports said. Earlier, in an attempt to contain China's worst ethnic violence in decades, the authorities imposed curfews, cut off cellphone and Internet services and sent armed police officers into neighborhoods. <...>

Despite the authorities efforts to bring the situation under control, hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists.

A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue Tuesday with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after Sunday's violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.

"A lot of ordinary people were taken away by the police," a protester named Qimanguli, a 13-year-old girl clad in a white T-shirt and a black headscarf, said, crying. She said her 19-year-old brother had been detained on Monday, long after the riots had ended. <...>

Internet social platforms and chat programs appeared to have unified Uighurs in anger over the way Chinese officials had handled the earlier brawl, which took place in late June thousands of miles away in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. There, Han workers rampaged through a Uighur dormitory, killing at least two Uighurs and injuring many others, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. Police officers later arrested a resentful former factory worker who had ignited the fight by spreading a rumor that six Uighur men had raped two Han women at the site, Xinhua reported. ...