At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British diplomatic cable that recounts the bloodshed in gruesome detail.
The document, made public more than 28 years after the event, describes injured girls being bayoneted, bodies being ground up by armoured vehicles and human remains being flushed into the sewers.
“Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000,” the then British Ambassador Alan Donald said in a secret telegram to London seen by AFP at Britain's National Archives.
The estimate, given on June 5, 1989, the day after the crackdown, is almost 10 times higher than that commonly accepted at the time.
Ambassador Donald's account gives horrific details of the violence unleashed on the night of June 3-4, when the army entered Beijing to end seven weeks of protests on Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of Communist power.
No debate
Nearly three decades after the crackdown, the Communist regime continues to forbid any debate on the subject, mention of which is banned from textbooks and the media, and censored on the Internet.
Ambassador Donald said the atrocities were committed by the 27th Army, who he described as ”60% illiterate and are called primitives”.
