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Beijing newsroom 'bomber' arrested
BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Beijing police have arrested a man who burst into an international news agency claiming to have a bomb, an official told CNN. Chinese state media outlet Xinhua has reported the bomb was a hoax. The man's arrest by armed police ended a two-hour hostage siege in which a number of journalists were held. The man, identified as Fang Qinghui, had burst into the 25-story Sunflower Tower in Beijing's eastern business district. Fang burst into the newsroom at around 10:30 a.m. (0230 GMT) shouting "no-one move, no-one move," according to Reuters reports. Wearing a black knee-length winter coat and sunglasses, he was carrying a black bag slung around his neck with wires hanging from it. His thumb was on a red button. Reuters journalists told CNN the man entered their office on the sixth floor and demanded a television interview. They said he told them he was born in 1968 and was from the Heilong Jiang province in northeast China. He also said he wanted to voice his concerns about corruption within the Chinese government. But a correspondent who speaks Chinese talked with the man for about 20 minutes and found him to be incoherent and told him there was nothing Reuters could do to help him. As the journalists were walking back to the main newsroom, the man motioned for everyone to back off and said he had a bomb in his backpack. They realized the he was clutching a red button-like object. Demands
"Leaders should respect, protect and love the workers," the man said, as he kept his thumb on the button. "I want the whole world to know how black China is, how corrupt it is," Fang later told police by telephone. Scores of Chinese police officers arrived soon after the siege began and evacuated every floor of the high-rise. They then cordoned off a large section of the perimeter around the building and moved spectators to the other side of Liangma River. The journalists said the man mostly ranted about the government, but they said he also complained he had been wrongly diagnosed as bi-polar, also known as schizophrenia, and had no one to talk with. The journalists said the man told them he used to work for a state-run factory, but had been laid-off five or six years ago. They said at one point, the man said he loved his mother. That prompted one of the journalists being held hostage to ask the man to let the three female journalists go, pleading "they were mothers, too." The man complied and shortly thereafter, released the male hostages, too. Beijing is under heightened security because China is holding its annual session of the National People's Congress, which ends March 18. The 13-day congress will mark the culmination of sweeping leadership changes pre-approved by the Communist Party last year, in the first orderly transfer of power in China's communist history. --CNN Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime FlorCruz and CNN producer Stephen Jiang contributed to this report.
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