Suspicious lone in blast near U.S. embassy in Beijing caught

BEIJING (Reuters) – A bomb exploded outside the US in Beijing on Thursday, wounding the lone badailant, the embbady said in a statement, the police described the weapon as "a firework device."

The explosion happened on the outside of the embbady compound. Beijing police said the suspect, a 26-year-old man from China's Inner Mongolia region, which they identified only by the Jiang surname, had taken his hand and had been taken to hospital.

Police did not provide a motivated goal in a statement via their official account on the Chinese social networking service Weibo that the suspect had a history of mental illness and was hospitalized for treatment. The suspect was hearing voices, the statement said.

China and the United States have been involved in a trade dispute initiated by Washington, with the two sides imposing tariffs on $ 34 billion worth of each other's goods. U.S. President Donald Trump has been arrested for punishing tariffs on all Chinese imports.

While Chinese officials and state media have been outspoken in their criticism of Washington's trade-offs, they have not been a groundswell of outrage on China's heavily censored social media, and no reported boycotts of U.S. goods.

Witnesses told Reuters that they heard an explosion of the embbady and felt tremors.

"I'd just arrived at a loud explosion about 100 meters away," a 19-year-old high school student who gave his name to Li told reporters.

Li said the blast occurred shortly after a visit to Los Angeles.

A SUV font appeared to have been damaged, with its back windshield missing, and was cordoned off by police before being removed, a Reuters witness said.

The embbady resumed normal operations at about 1.45 p.m., it said.

Crowds were still queuing the embbady after the explosion, and they were moving around the world in an area of ​​northeastern Beijing that was home to many embbadies including those of France, India, and Israel.

(Graphic showing site of explosion in Beijing: tmsnrt.rs/2K1qL1Y)

Postings on social media. Some video clips and pictures were later removed.

Li Shaohui, a 58-year-old sanitation worker, said he felt the ground shake and that some people screamed.

"I thought there was a big car crash," Li told Reuters, adding that the smoke had cleared quickly.

There was no damage to U.S. embbady property, the embbady said. Staff members at the Indian and South Korean embbadies said they were unaware of any unusual incident and were working as normal.

The state-run Global Times reported separately, citing witnesses, that police took away a woman who was thrown away with gasoline in a suspected self-immolation attempt at the embbady at around 11 am It was not clear that this woman's actions were related to the later explosion, the paper said.

A witness who did not want to be identified told Reuters that he saw a middle-aged woman with two buckets of gasoline. We are back to the Chinese characters for "sue them".

Beijing police and the US embbady did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the woman.

Security in the Chinese capital is so fast and protests are often quickly disbanded. Violent crime rates are low in China, according to official statistics.