BEIJING • At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British diplomatic cable that recounts the bloodshed in gruesome detail..
BEIJING • At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British diplomatic cable that recounts the bloodshed in gruesome detail.
The document, made public more than 28 years after the event, describes injured girls being bayoneted, bodies being ground up by armoured vehicles and human remains flushed into the sewers.
“Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000,” then British ambassador Alan Donald said in the secret telegram to London seen by AFP at Britain’s National Archives.
The estimate, given on June 5,1989, the day after the crackdown, is almost 10 times higher than the commonly accepted toll at the time, of several hundred to more than a thousand.
But experts said the 10,000 figure seemed credible. The ambassador’s account gives horrific details of the violence unleashed on the night of June 3 to 4, when the army entered Beijing to end seven weeks of protests on Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of Communist power.
