kristof’s scoop

nicholas kristof filed this report for the monday june 4th edition:

When troops finally seized Tiananmen Square early Sunday morning, they allowed the student occupiers who held on to the center of the square for three weeks to leave and then sent tanks to run over the tents and makeshift encampment that demonstrators had set up. Unconfirmed reports rapidly spread that some students had remained in the tents and were crushed to death.

The troops sealed off Tiananmen Square and started a huge bonfire. Many Beijing residents drew the conclusion, again impossible to verify, that the soldiers cremated corpses to destroy the evidence.

”I saw a young woman tell the soldiers that they are the people’s army, and that they mustn’t hurt the people,” a young doctor said after returning from one clash Sunday. ”Then the soldiers shot her, and ran up and bayonetted her. I ran away, so I couldn’t tell if she lived or died.” News of the killings quickly spread to other parts of China, principally by radio reports from the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

China’s television news on Sunday night showed the army knocking down a replica of the Statue of Liberty that students had put in place on the square. The broadcast hailed troops for ”victoriously crushing this counterrevolutionary rebellion.”