At around 7 p.m. on May 30 in Chongqing city, central China, a traffic police officer fatally shot a 49-year-old man. The official police statement provided very little information about the incident, claiming the man attacked the policeman first. However, one eyewitness provided a more detailed account to The Epoch Times, raising concerns about the policeman’s actions.
According to the Beipei District Police Station statement published on its social media Weibo account, the unidentified man and his wife attacked the police before he was shot. However, no further details were provided, and no official police video was released. At the time of writing, the Weibo notice, released on the morning of May 31, is the only official statement about the incident.
Some videos can be found on various Chinese social media platforms, but they only show the aftermath and many onlookers, and none of them captured what happened before the shooting.
On May 31, the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times spoke with an eyewitness whose pseudonym is Yusheng. He believes that the police may have overreacted to the incident.
According to Yusheng, the incident began with a minor motorcycle accident involving a woman and a couple.
They went to a motorcycle repair shop to evaluate the damage, got into an argument, and called the police. A few policemen arrived and tried to mitigate the situation. The wife was unhappy about the police mitigation.
Yusheng recalled: “Somehow, she threw the policeman’s hat to the ground. The police then pushed her to the ground. Upon seeing his wife pushed to the ground, the husband confronted the policeman. In fact, the scuffle between the policeman and the woman was a little over one minute. And less than one minute after the man confronted the police, the gunshot was heard.”
“I don’t know exactly how it [gunshot] happened. Under normal circumstances, the police wouldn’t just pull out their gun. But then we heard the loud gunshot, and everyone was shocked.”
Yusheng also said the ambulance arrived about 20 minutes later. More police also arrived at the scene, and they grabbed the wife, preventing her from getting on the ambulance with her husband.
“It happened so fast; nobody knew how the bullet was loaded and how the trigger lock was unlocked; only the police himself knew,” Yusheng said.
“If my wife were pushed to the ground like that, I would have reacted the same way. The husband’s action posed little danger [to the police]. The police could have easily held him back with his bare hands. So why use the gun?” he added.
Yusheng’s account corroborated another eyewitness report by Chinese news portal Sohu.
In addition, many netizens commented on the incident. Some sided with the policeman, with one saying, “The police is always right.” But others questioned the policeman’s actions and asked for more evidence.
There is no information about where the man was pronounced dead, and his family has not released a statement.
The Epoch Times attempted to reach out to the Beipei District Police Station traffic police division for comment. But the call did not go through.
The publication also called the higher-level agency, the Chongqing Municipal Police Station. When asked about the police shooting incident, the staff responded, “We go by the official statement.”
Located in south central China’s Sichuan Province, Chongqing is one of the four municipalities directly under the central government’s jurisdiction (bypassing the provincial government), along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It has a population of over 30 million.
As of press time, there have been no updates to the official police statement on Weibo. The report concluded that “a procuratorate agency is involved, and the investigation is ongoing.”
