By IOL South Asia Correspondent

NEW DELHI, February 25 (IslamOnline.net) - In a freak incident, a brawl over a sport turned into an ethnic strife Monday, February 24, leaving hundreds of people injured and a large number of shops and restaurants owned by Hui Muslim minority ransacked in far western China on the borders of Tibet.

Army has been deployed in the riot-torn areas and around the bridge over the Huang Ho river, which demarcates Tibetan and Muslim areas as a Muslim was stabbed to death with a meat skewer and several others injured by frenzied mobs of Tibetan people in Jiangzha county.

Shops and restaurants owned by Muslims were either damaged or looted in the violence, which reportedly flared up on February 14.

Local government officials have been dispatched to the area to pacify people.

Qinghai province is a poor region, some 1,600 kilometers west of Beijing, bordering Tibet.

Slightly larger than Texas, Qinghai is inhabited by five million people.

Most of the areas is traditionally inhabited by Mongolian and Tibetan herders and claimed as part of historical Tibet.

A resettlement program being run by the Chinese government in the region to move 17,000 mostly Chinese and Hui Muslim settlers to Qinghai as part of an economic development plan is said to be fanning ethnic passions among Tibetans.

Muslim settlers are expected to occupy a former labor camp in Dulan country where an irrigation project is underway.

The project is assisted by the World Bank, which is willing to earmark $40 million towards the cost of resettling 60,000 people.

Earlier, the loan was shelved after Tibetan activists contended that the plan would dilute Qinghai’s Tibetan character and ravage the environment by increasing demands for water and farmland.