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URUMQI, China: Residents of China's Urumqi city were banned from gathering in public places on Sunday for a traditional day of mourning, one week after ethnic unrest left more than 180 people dead.
Highlighting the extremely fragile nature of an enforced peace between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, riot police also stepped up security in particularly sensitive parts of the city.
"Assemblies, marches and demonstrations on public roads and at public places in the open air are not allowed without police permission," said a notice posted on streets in the capital of China's far northwest Xinjiang region.
It added that police would disperse public gatherings and detain people who refused to move away, and specifically mentioned that no one was allowed to carry weapons.
Sunday was the seventh day since riots by Uighurs on July 5 that the government said left 184 people dead, most of whom were Han, China's dominant ethnic group.
In Han culture, the seventh day is an important time for mourning the dead.
Relatives are meant to go out into the streets to burn incense and paper money, helping lost souls of the deceased to find their way back home.
But the government apparently was fearful this could ignite further unrest, after thousands of Han took to the streets of Urumqi early last week wielding machetes, poles and other makeshift weapons vowing vengeance against Uighurs.
AFP witnessed Han mobs assaulting two Uighurs in separate attacks then, and Uighurs alleged many other beatings took place, despite a huge security presence.
The government has not said if anyone died in clashes after the initial July 5 unrest, but Uighurs in the city have told AFP that mobs of Han did kill people.
"We are scared. We don't want to go to the train station or other areas where there are a lot of Han," said a college-educated Uighur man who did not want his named published.
"It's going to be pretty tense for a while. I think you are going to see people spending more time indoors watching TV."
But the fear was just as deep on the other side of the ethnic divide.
"No, no, no. It's still dangerous," said a Han supermarket owner surnamed Lin when asked if he would venture into the Uighur district of the city of 2.3 million people.
"I had friends who went there yesterday who were threatened by Uighurs and they had to run out of there."
In one of the most visible signs of increased security in Urumqi on Sunday, police again blocked off major roads leading into the main Uighur district after allowing relatively free passage over the previous two days.
Han mobs had descended on to those roads early in the week in their hunt for Uighurs, before mostly being turned back by riot police and soldiers.
Xinjiang has eight million Uighurs who make up roughly 40 percent of the vast region's population.
They have long complained about repression and discrimination under Chinese rule, accusations the government insists are baseless.
Residents in other cities and towns across Xinjiang, a sparsely populated region of deserts and mountains that makes up a sixth of China's territory, also reported intense security and a mood of fear on Sunday.
"There are more policemen patrolling the streets. The shops are closing maybe one or two hours earlier than normal," a Han Chinese shopowner in Kashgar told AFP by telephone.
Foreign reporters have been banned from reporting in Kashgar, the famous Old Silk Road city where lower-level unrest has occurred in recent years, with authorities citing safety concerns.
An explosion on Sunday morning at a factory belonging to China's biggest energy producer on the outskirts of Urumqi also raised tensions briefly.
But the company quickly said there were no casualties and no foul play involved.
"We have ruled out terrorism," Liu Jiyuan, the vice manager of the China National Petroleum Corporation plant, told AFP at the factory.
- AFP/so
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