Within minutes of a fiery vehicle crash at the gate of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, photographs started hitting China’s social media networks.  Within hours, many of them had been scrubbed by China’s Internet censors.

Five people were killed in the vehicle, a Jeep or similar type of four-wheel drive SUV.  Three were in the vehicle, one was a female tourist from the Philippines and the fifth was a man from Guangdong province in southern China.  As many as 38 people were hurt.

Journalists from the BBC and Agence France Presse were detained and some of their images deleted.  But mobile phones with cameras are largely made in China, and photos were uploaded to the Internet pretty quickly.  Before long, trucks and barriers were placed in the way, and all one could see was the portrait of Chairman Mao peering through Beijing’s foul, smoggy atmosphere.  The pictures that survived the scrubbing were uploaded to offshore servers or copied by foreign news services.

Perhaps because it happened at the confluence of ancient, old, and modern China, officials haven’t released a lot of information about what happened.  Online commentators sought to fill that void, floating conspiracy theories of a possible terrorist attack, or some sort of protest.  Tiananmen has been the site of demonstrations over the years, not the least of which were the 1989 Pro-Democracy Demonstrations.