Heavy armed police presence at Tiananmen on massacre anniversary
ROC Central News Agency
2012/06/04 18:30:16
Beijing, June 4 (CNA) Tiananmen Square attracted its usual crowds of tourists Monday, who were treated to the spectacle of an extraordinary deployment of heavily armed police and public security personnel in the area.
On the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, a variety of police vehicles were deployed in the vast square, including buses as big as tourist coaches, vans, solar-powered vehicles and two-wheeled self-balancing electric transporters for patrol guards.
In addition, more police trucks than usual were parked on the roads surrounding the square. In temperatures of over 30 degrees Celsius, police and tourists shuttled around the site of the 1989 massacre, in which at least hundreds of people were killed during a military suppression of calls for freedom and democracy.
Asked about the police deployment, one local resident said there seemed to be far more police officers than usual.
Asked whether or not he knew about the incident of 23 years ago, a Chinese visitor to the square said he had already forgotten about it. Another local resident, identified only by his surname of Liu, replied it was an event of the past. "We must look ahead," he said.
However, while the tourists shot pictures in the square, many family members of the massacre victims held rallies in other provinces such as Fujian and Guizhou, calling for vindication for those killed in the massacre.
(By Tsai Shu-jung and Elizabeth Hsu)
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