THE chain of events that led to numerous deaths at the hands of the police in a village in southern China began with a bitter feud over one of the oldest of all Chinese traditions, the ancestral grave.

Inquiries last week established that the death toll in Dongzhou, near Shanwei city, on a night of violence on December 6 was closer to the 20 claimed by villagers than to the three acknowledged by the government.

An angry demonstration over compensation for land ended with village women on their knees, burning joss sticks as they pleaded with the police for the bodies of their menfolk.

Despite censorship and a ruthless dragnet for witnesses, villagers have communicated detailed allegations that people were mown down in a volley of automatic weapons fire, were murdered inside a police armoured vehicle and that some corpses were tossed into the sea. They also smuggled out photographs showing wounded victims lying on makeshift stretchers with blood pouring from apparent gunshot injuries to their heads and upper bodies.

There are persistent reports that even now secret police agents are offering money for hidden corpses and are trying to buy empty cartridge casings to suppress forensic evidence.

On December 6 the villagers took to the streets. Xinhua, the state news agency, said they had spears, knives, Molotov cocktails and dynamite.

“It’s untrue,” said a villager, speaking by phone. “We had just home-made fireworks.”

Whatever the truth, the official in charge, Wu Sheng, vice-director of the Shanwei Public Security Bureau, ordered his men to fire. He has since been detained by prosecutors. The state-controlled Guangzhou Daily said that he had “mishandled” the situation.

Several villagers spoke of 10 people mown down in one burst of fire and accounts on overseas Chinese websites said they had found eight to 10 bodies scattered on the grass afterwards.

“It was so brutal,” a man called Chen told the anti-communist Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong. “One villager was shot in the leg. He knelt down to beg for his life. But they dragged him over to a pile of grass and shot him twice.”

The testimony given by a villager to Grace Kei Lai-see, a reporter for the Cantonese service of Radio Free Asia, points to a killing frenzy.

“That night there were injured people who were dragged aboard police vehicles and shot to death,” the witness said. “The police then took the bodies to the crematorium near the beach but because there was no signature on the death certificates for cremation, they threw the bodies into the sea instead.

“This definitely happened. The bodies were discovered when they began to float.”

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