A Chinese court Saturday sentenced three people to up to 15 years' jail in the first convictions over a wave of syringe attacks blamed on Muslim separatists in the northwest region of Xinjiang.
The mysterious assaults provoked demonstrations last week by Han Chinese demanding the government improve safety in the regional capital Urumqi, which has been tense since ethnic unrest in July which left nearly 200 dead.
In the first conviction announced Saturday, a court in Urumqi found Yilipan Yilihamu, a 19-year-old student, guilty of an "attack with a dangerous substance," court president Shi Xinli said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The man was sentenced to 15 years in jail after being convicted of stabbing a woman with a syringe at a street market on August 28. He was arrested four hours after the attack, Shi said.
State television CCTV said the young man intended to appeal.
In a second case heard in the same court Saturday, Muhutaerjiang Turdi, a 34-year-old man, and Aimannisha Guli, a woman of 22, were sentenced to 10 and seven years in prison, respectively.
On August 29, they had threatened a taxi driver with a syringe and robbed him of 710 yuan (104 dollars), according to CCTV, which broadcast images of the two accused clad in orange prison clothing, facing the court and guarded by police.
The woman was captured the same day as the robbery and the man surrendered to police three days later, the news agency said.
Xinhua said the proceedings, which lasted three hours, were held in Uighur with Mandarin translation, as requested by the defendants who were believed to be ethnic Uighurs, the dominant ethnic group in the restive region.
More than 200 people attended the court hearings, including family members of the accused and their victims, the agency reported.
Foreign media were not invited.
A court official contacted by AFP confirmed the sentences but would not give details.
The authorities have vowed that those responsible for the attacks would face harsh punishment if the syringes were found to contain poisonous substances.
The police in Urumqi have reported more than 500 syringe attacks but, in most cases, according to the authorities the syringes did not contain any harmful substances.
The China Daily newspaper on Friday reported that syringe attacks had occurred in other towns across Xinjiang.
Last week's demonstrations saw Urumqi Communist Party chief Li Zhi and regional police chief Liu Yaohua removed from their posts.
In early July, Urumqi was wracked by the country's worst ethnic unrest in decades which left 197 dead, mostly Han Chinese killed by Uighurs.
China blamed the unrest on "separatists" but Uighurs say it was sparked when security forces reacted harshly to peaceful protests over an earlier factory brawl in southern China that state media said left two Uighurs dead.
The mainly Muslim Uighurs have long chafed at what many say has been decades of Chinese oppression and unwanted immigration of millions of ethnic Han.
Officially, 83 people have been arrested in connection with the unrest.
Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer on Friday called on democratic countries to put pressure on China and "other dictatorships" to respect human rights and protect ethnic minorities.
"China cannot isolate itself from the rest of the world, so the pressure of the international community and democratic countries is very important," Kadeer, the US-based head of the World Uighur Congress, told delegates at a conference in Prague focused on democracy and human rights in Asia.
The Chinese authorities accuse Kadeer of having orchestrated the violence which erupted in July in Xinjiang, a vast region of deserts and mountains bordering Central Asia.
Xinjiang has around 20 million inhabitants divided among 47 ethnic groups, of which the Han Chinese have increased from six percent to 40 percent of the population under political policies advocated by Beijing since the 1990s.
The region's eight million Uighurs, a central Asian, Turkic-speaking people have long complained of Chinese religious and political oppression.
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