The Yunnan provincial branch of China's Public Security Bureau said in a statement posted on its Web site July 21 that two separate public bus explosions that occurred the same day in Kunming city were acts of sabotage. The bureau did not verify a third explosion — also in Kunming -– that was reported by non-state-controlled media outlets. The first explosion reportedly went off at 7:10 a.m. local time on a bus stopped at the Panjiawan stop, killing one person and wounding 10, with the force of the blast blowing out one side of the bus. The second device exploded at a nearby intersection on the same line (No. 54) at 8:05 a.m., killing a second person and wounding an additional four. Mining explosives reportedly were used in both incidents. The Yunnan government has since installed roadside checkpoints in an effort to track down the perpetrators. Reports by state news agency Xinhua and Yunnan police accounts did not mention a third blast that reportedly took place nearby at Minshan, killing a third victim (who died while en route to a hospital). Reuters reported the incident, quoting an online report published by the Chinese-language China News Service. That report was subsequently pulled, as was an initial piece from the Chinese-language United Morning Post reporting three blasts, subsequently amended to two. Details are usually hard to pin down in a highly chaotic environment after such attacks, so it is likely that the report of the third blast was later found to be incorrect and is not indicative of some sort of a cover-up. As yet, there is no consensus on who the culprits are. Hitting two buses within an hour is a standard militant tactic, but the location and targeting of these particular blasts make them unlikely to be the work of an international jihadist movement, whose cause would have been arguably better publicized with an alternative location such as Sichuan or Tibet. Nor is there evidence to suggest that the target of the attack was a foreign corporation, given that the advertisements pasted on the outside of the damaged buses appear to be for local Chinese products. Public transport in China has been attacked before in the name of airing public grievances, which frequently relate to business disputes or protection money. However, the scale of these blasts appears to be notably smaller than other recent security incidents — such as a May 5 public bus fire in Shanghai that security officials privately said was started by an individual boarding the bus with flammable materials, or a March 3 tourist bus hijacking in Xian. Without additional information, the photos and details provided thus far of these blasts leave an enormous list of suspects, ranging from fired employees to jilted lovers. A starting list of possible suspects could include: disgruntled workers (such as a recently dismissed employee of the bus company in question, or a recently laid off manufacturing sector worker); a disgruntled military recruit with easy access to explosives; or one or several of the 500-odd angry rubber farmers who were dispersed from a protest against a local private rubber company one day earlier in Yunnan's Menglian County, after a clash with police left 41 officers injured and two farmers dead. There appears to have been a slight uptick in the number of small-scale domestic acts of sabotage in recent months. This is possibly due in part to Beijing cutting off access (in preparation for the Olympics) for traveling petitioners who used to hand-deliver their complaints to the central government's front door in the capital. Partly because of this, and partly because of the pre-Olympic loosening of restrictions on media movements inside China, individual actors might have begun to treat the final weeks before the Olympics as a window of opportunity to draw local and foreign media attention to their causes. As STRATFOR has noted before, these types of incidents and local-level riots are nearly impossible for Chinese police and security forces to predict and prevent. That Beijing is playing down these blasts as "sabotage" rather than denouncing them as "acts of terrorism" only confirms the government's worries over the very real threats to China's transportation infrastructure security. Beijing wants to prevent any would-be Olympic tourists from canceling their visits due to the perceived risk of any such attacks occurring. Ultimately, the location of the bombing matters. Kunming is a frontier boom town. It is the distribution terminal for drugs from the Golden Triangle, and the center of China's Mekong policies and initiatives for rejuvenating its underdeveloped hinterlands. In short, it is China's Wild West. Yunnan will not be hosting any Olympic events. If these blasts are part of a wider organized movement, then we will see more similar incidents in the coming days, possibly in more sensitive or strategic places such as Beijing, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang or Qinhuangdao — all of which will be hosting Olympic events. But regardless of whether more incidents occur, Beijing's prioritization of security issues is set to intensify.