China gives death sentence over Uighur brawl case

Paramilitary policemen walk past the Intermediate People's Court in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region September 12, 2009.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A court in southern China has handed out a death sentence to a man involved in a brawl in July blamed for being the trigger to deadly riots in the restive far western region of Xinjiang.

State media said the fight erupted between a group of Han Chinese and ethnic Uighur workers from Xinjiang at a factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, after a rumour spread that some Uighurs had raped two women.

The courts in Shaoguan also gave another man life imprisonment, and nine others got sentences ranging from five to eight years in jail, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Two Uighur workers were beaten to death in the fight, and three others were severely injured, the report said.

"The court was told that the brawl started after a Uighur male worker was found by other workers chasing a Han woman intern surnamed Huang in the factory," Xinhua said.

Other Han then turned on the Uighurs, beating them with iron bars and stopping medical personnel from treating the wounded, it added.

The man given the death sentence was a Han Chinese.

Nearly all Uighurs to whom Reuters spoke in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi, where almost 200 people died in the July riots, traced the protests back to their own anger over the confrontation in southern China.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Bill Tarrant)