Talk:Pishan hostage crisis

Neutrality
One of the central components of this story as it was written when I came across it was that the suspected kidnappers were attempting to reach Pakistan for terrorist training. This claim turned out to be sourced to an anonymous local official quoted in the Chinese state-run tabloid The Global Times. That article's title is "Police shoot dead 7 terrorists in Xinjiang" which is a biased title- the quintessence of fake news. I therefore hid the material in the lead that claimed they were trying to enter Pakistan. There was no real evidence of the claim provided, and a claim asserted without any evidence is dismissed just as easily.

I would say that given what I found here, the tone of the entire article is in serious question. The New York Times was telling us what the Global Times said, but it wasn't actually saying that what the Global Times said was true. Every word in this article must be reassessed according to the actual weight of the evidence for the claims made. Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:21, 30 December 2019 (UTC)


 * A police officer from the Pishan county Public Security Bureau confirmed to RFA in a phone interview that the group had been trying to leave China.


 * "The 'traitors' tried to illegally cross the border and seek political asylum from an enemy country," he said.


 * Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:34, 30 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Also, I never found the 'Mukula village' mentioned in the RFA article. Qoshtagh village seems to refer to the township, now town, of Koxtag (Kuoshi Tage). Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:37, 30 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Mukula is this place: . This Chinese article lists identities of the 6 of 7 of the deceased, along with identities of 2 of 5 captured. Reading between the lines, of the identities released, all deceased were adults and all captured were children children. --Voidvector (talk) 23:30, 26 January 2020 (UTC)