BEIJING, October 29 (Christopher Bodeen, The Associated Press) – Police investigating the vehicle that plowed through pedestrians and crashed at Beijing's Forbidden City in an apparent suicide rampage searched Tuesday for information on two ethnic Uighur minority suspects believed linked to the attack, which killed five people and injured 38.
Police released no public information about a possible motive for the incident at one of China's most politically sensitive and heavily guarded public spaces.
But investigators sent a notice to hotels in the city aimed at tracing the recent movements of two suspects in Monday's attack, and possibly at uncovering any co-conspirators still at-large.
The sport utility vehicle veered inside a barrier separating a crowded sidewalk from a busy avenue and then plowed through pedestrians as it sped toward Tiananmen Gate, where it crashed into a stone structure near a large portrait of Mao Zedong, which hangs near the southern entrance to the former imperial palace.
The vehicle's three occupants were killed, along with two bystanders, including a Filipino woman. The 38 injured included three other Filipinos and a Japanese man, police said.
The gate stands opposite sprawling Tiananmen Square, which was the focus of the 1989 pro-democracy movement that was violently suppressed by the military, and any incident there is highly sensitive.
Zhao Fuzhou, a security official at Beijing's Xinjiang Dasha hotel, said police had circulated a notice searching for information about two suspects with Uighur names in the aftermath of Monday's deaths.
A clerk at the Hubei Mansion hotel also confirmed receiving the notice, while employees at other hotels said they'd been told not to discuss the matter.
The notice asked hotels about the two suspects, and to report any suspicious guests or vehicles registered with their establishments going back to Oct. 1.
One of the men, identified in the notice as Yusupu Wumaierniyazi, was listed as living at the address of a town in the northwestern Uighur homeland of Xinjiang in which 24 police and civilians and 13 militants were killed in an attack on June 26.
Beijing police referred reporters' questions to a spokesman whose phone rang unanswered. Radicals among the Muslim Turkic Uighurs have been fighting a low-intensity insurgency against Chinese rule for years.
This summer saw an unusually large number of violent incidents and Chinese security forces say they have been guarding against attacks outside of Xinjiang.
Uighurs are culturally, religiously and linguistically distinct from China's ethnic Han majority and many have chafed under heavy-handed Communist Party rule.
