Chinese riot over SARS facility
BEIJING (Reuters) - A riot broke out in a town near Beijing after its people learned of a plan to use an abandoned school to quarantine people suspected of having the SARS virus, officials say.
The riot erupted on Sunday in Chagugang, a township of some 32,500 people about 70 km (45 miles) southeast of Beijing, a local government official said on Tuesday.
"The school building was not going to be transformed into a hospital, but a quarantine for people who have been in contact with SARS patients," said the official, who declined to give his name.
"From my personal point of view, the spontaneous protection by the local people of their immediate interests is understandable. But later, some people took advantage of them to incite the riot," he said.
The official declined to elaborate, or to say how many people took part in the disturbance, whether there were injuries, or how it was resolved.
When asked if the school would still be converted into a SARS quarantine facility, the official said higher authorities were meeting and would make a decision soon.
Other local officials declined to comment, although one district police officer dismissed the incident as a "misunderstanding".
A flu-like illness that can cause pneumonia, SARS first appeared in southern China late last year and has spread to 25 countries, infecting more than 5,500 and killing more than 330 people, about 140 of them in China.
The riot highlights deep public distress in China over SARS, which the government covered up until intense international pressure earlier this month forced it to admit that thousands had been infected across the country.
It was also the latest sign of the undercurrent of panic in and around Beijing, which has reported nearly 1,200 infections and 59 deaths from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
At one village on the outskirts of Beijing, residents had set up a checkpoint to screen people coming out of the capital and bar those not from the village.
"In order to prevent SARS from spreading through our village, we have put up temporary checkpoints so that outsiders don't come in. This way we can insure that people from our village don't get SARS," village leader Zhang Yueshan told Reuters Television.
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