Dozens injured in bomb attack on China bank

Dozens of people have been injured in a gasoline bomb attack on a rural bank in a heavily Tibetan area of northwest China, the Chinese state news agency reports.

The official Xinhua news agency said that a man threw a homemade gasoline bomb into the bank, setting it ablaze, during a 9 a.m. staff meeting at the Tianzhu County Rural Credit United Cooperative in Wuwei city, in the northwestern province of Gansu.

Xinhua first reported that the bomb attack had caused "significant deaths and injuries," but later said that while there were no initial deaths from the explosion, at least 39 people had been injured, 6 of them seriously.

A witness said he saw more than 10 people throw themselves out of the window of a fourth-floor meeting room, while others with “charred” bodies were seen being carried out of the building on stretchers, AFP says, citing a Xinhua report. Police and medical workers were at the scene, and the street had reportedly been cordoned off.

The Tianzhu government said that Yang Xianwen, a Han Chinese fired from his job at the bank last month after being accused of embezzlement, had thrown a bottle filled with gasoline into a meeting room, Reuters reports, citing a statement by local government (full statement, in Chinese).

"He harbored a grudge, and committed arson in the name of revenge," the statement said.

Yang fled the scene and police were "urgently" looking for him, it added.

Wuwei city is in Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, where about a third of the 210,000 residents are said to be ethnic Tibetans.

While large-scale bomb attacks are rare in China, there have been incidents of disgruntled residents setting off homemade explosions to complain about local grievances, Reuters says. There have also been bomb attacks in the mainly Muslim Uighur western region of Xinjiang.

There has also been frequent unrest in Western China by ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs who chafe at Chinese Communist Party rule.