BEIJING: A deadly fire in China's northwest Xinjiang region has spurred an outpouring of anger at the country's zero-COVID policy, as Beijing fights growing public fatigue over its hardline approach to containing the coronaviruses.
Ten people were killed and nine injured when a fire ripped through a residential building in the regional capital Urumqi on Thursday night, according to state news agency Xinhua.
Several online posts circulating on both Chinese and overseas social media platforms have claimed that long COVID 19 lockdowns in the city hampered rescue attempts.
Several videos showed crowds of people protesting the measures in the streets of Urumqi.
The action comes against mounting public anger over the government's zero tolerance approach to COVID 19 and sporadic protests in other cities.
China is the last major economy that has been tied to a zero-COVID strategy, with authorities wielding snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing to snuff out new outbreaks as they emerge.
Footage partially verified by AFP shows hundreds of people massing outside the Urumqi city government offices during the night, chanting: Lift lockdowns! Hundreds of people are seen marching through a neighbourhood in the east of the city, shouting the same slogan before facing off with a line of hazmat-clad officials and angrily rebuking security personnel.
The journalists of the AFP were able to verify the videos by geolocating local landmarks, but were unable to specify when exactly the protests occurred.
On Friday a wave of anger simmered on the Weibo social media platform after it was reported that parked electric vehicles left without power during lengthy lockdowns blocked fire engines from entering a narrow road to the burning building.
I'm the one throwing myself off the roof, trapped in an overturned quarantine bus, breaking out of isolation at the Foxconn factory, read a comment referencing several recent incidents blamed on zero-COVID strictures.
Chinese authorities censor online content deemed politically sensitive and appeared to have scrubbed many posts and hashtags relating to the fire on Saturday morning.
Urumqi police said in a Friday post on Weibo that they had detained a woman surnamed Su for spreading online rumours relating to the number of casualties from the blaze.
According to state television, an initial investigation showed that the blaze was caused by a board of electric sockets in the family bedroom of one of the apartments.
The rescue attempts were complicated by a lack of parking spaces and a large number of private vehicles parked on both sides of a narrow road to the building, city fire and rescue chief Li Wensheng told reporters late Friday.
Urumqi mayor Maimaitiming Kade offered a rare formal apology for the blaze at the briefing, according to the broadcaster.
But officials pushed back against some of the online allegations, denying that residents' doors had been closed with iron wiring.
COVID 19 controls have confined some communities in Urumqi - a city of 4 million people - to their homes for weeks on end.
After the protests, officials said the city had basically reduced social transmissions to zero and would restore normal order of life for residents in low-risk areas in a staged and orderly manner. In recent days, violent protests have been erupting at a large COVID-hit factory in the central city of Zhengzhou due to a dispute over pay and labour conditions.
On Saturday, China had 34,909 new domestic infections, the majority of which were asymptomatic, according to the National Health Commission.