A petrol bomb set off on Friday by a disgruntled former employee at a rural bank in a Tibetan region of north-western China's Gansu province wounded 49 people, Xinhua news agency and the local government said. Nineteen people were seriously hurt in the blast at the Tianzhu County Rural Credit United Co-operative, in the city of Wuwei in Tianzhu county, caused by what a witness called a "gasoline bomb", Xinhua said in an English-language report.
The Tianzhu government said that Yang Xianwen, a Han Chinese man fired from his job at the bank last month after being accused of embezzlement, had thrown a bottle filled with petrol into a meeting room, setting it ablaze. "He harboured a grudge, and committed arson in the name of revenge," the local government said in a statement on its website (http://www.gstianzhu.gov.cn/huarui/news/tzxw/).
Yang fled the scene, but police caught him hours later, a second Xinhua report said. Bomb attacks are rare in China, although disgruntled residents have set off explosions in buses and buildings in the past to complain about local grievances. There have also been bomb attacks by militants in the far western region of Xinjiang, where members of the Muslim Uighur minority chafe at Chinese controls.