Several people were killed and houses set on fire in clashes in central China between minority Muslims and members of the Han community sparked by the death of a girl in a traffic accident, residents said.

Martial law had been imposed to quell the violence, an official said. He said he had not heard of any deaths but said many people had been injured. The clashes late last week in Henan province started when a taxi driven by a member of the Hui Muslim ethnic group struck and killed a girl from the majority Han Chinese community. Fighting soon erupted in several villages, the residents said.

“People were so afraid. No one dared to go to work or go outside. Even the transportation has been stopped,” said one resident of a Han village involved in the clash who declined to give her name.

She said at least one person in her village had been killed in the fighting, and she had heard at least several others were dead. Another resident in the same village said more than 10 people had been killed. Houses had been burned, and residents said the fighting had escalated when Hui villagers from outside the area were trucked in. The situation was now calm, with armed police patrolling.

Clashes between Hui people, who make up about 10 million of China’s 1.3 billion population, and Han are not common but tension, exacerbated by a widening wealth gap, has on occasion erupted in violence.

In 1993, a cartoon ridiculing Muslims led to paramilitary police storming a mosque taken over by armed Hui in the northwestern province of Xining, and in the past decade there have been scattered minor incidents around the country.

But unrest in rural areas has been increasing, fuelled by dissatisfaction over poverty and corruption, despite authorities’ obsession with stability. In the past month, a quarrel in the western region of Chongqing escalated into a riot that led to looting of government buildings and burning of police cars.

<B>“Village sealed off”</B>

A child from one of the Hui villages involved in the Henan clashes said adults there were in a meeting. He said school was in session, but students were being kept indoors. Adults reached hung up the phone.

“That village has been isolated. No one there is allowed to go out,” said one of the residents of the Han village, referring to the Hui community. An official at a Muslim association also said there had been deaths, but could not say how many.

But officials denied a report in the New York Times that 150 people had been killed. “I haven’t heard there’s been any deaths, but the number of the injured is big,” said an official in the nearby city of Kaifeng.

Martial law was still in force, said the official, who also confirmed that Hui farmers had travelled to the scene to help Hui villagers. An official with the Zhengzhou public security bureau declined to comment saying such issues were national secrets until the case was wrapped up.

<B>Lindsay Beck</B>