2013 Tiananmen Square attack A 4x4 vehicle crashed into a crowd and burst into flames near the portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square. All three people inside the car were killed as well as two tourists in the square–one Filipino woman and the other a male Chinese citizen from Guangdong province. Thirty-eight people were injured. Witnesses at the scene said that the car involved in the incident was honking its horn at pedestrians. Chinese police later issued a notice to Beijing hotels seeking information about two people from China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The notice described a vehicle and four Xinjiang number plates.
Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident and expert on Falun Gong, Pan's portrayal of Liu Chunlin is highly inconsistent with the typical profile of a Falun Gong practitioner. The identities of participants on Tiananmen Square was also called into question by a CNN producer on the scene. While the Chinese government claimed that a 12-year-old Liu Siying had set herself on fire at the urging of her mother, the CNN producer said that she did not see any children among the self-immolators. Several observers have noted that foreign journalists were not allowed to interview the self-immolation victims recovering in hospitals. Even the victims' relatives were not