Like many reporters, I rushed down to the Wangfujing pedestrian walkway in Beijing yesterday afternoon when word came out that three people had set their own car afire in what appeared to be self-immolation.

The event happened at about 2:50 p.m., according to the police.

I went with my assistant and got there at about 5:40 p.m. A knot of Japanese television reporters were on the scene, at the corner of Chang'an Boulevard, barely a few hundred meters from Tiananmen Square. I split with my assistant and we began asking people what they had seen. The scattering of bicycle lot attendants and other people with fixed jobs there virtually all said the same thing: “Saw nothing.” Clearly, they had been instructed not to speak.

The photos above and below are floating around the internet. They show the silver car with flags on top in which the three passengers rode before they set themselves afire. It looks like perhaps a body is lying behind the car. I can't tell for sure.

A police statement said that the three had come to Beijing as petitioners. That means that they had serious grievances and felt they could only get redress by coming to China’s capital.

It also made no mention of any death. It said two of the three were injured but neither was in life-threatening condition in the hospital.

A Hong Kong radio station said one of the people appears to be a Muslim Uyghur from the far west Xinjiang province. The ethnicity of the other two is not clear.

Self-immolation is a sign of fairly severe desperation. Frankly, I was a little surprised that the state Xinhua news agency would even carry a short item about this as sensitive as it is about China’s overseas image. Yet because of censorship, we may never know the full extent of the grievances of these three people.