KOTA KINABALU, MALAYSIA: A housewife here is anxious about the fate of her parents and relatives in the distant China city of Urumqi where more than 150 people have died in ethnic violence.

Li Jin, a Chinese national, has been frantically trying to call her father Li Hua An, mother Guo Min and sister Li Ya Qian at their home in the Urumqi suburb of Dong Shan since Monday after watching news reports of the riots there.

"It has been futile; there's no phone service there now," said a sobbing Li Jin, 32, as she tried to call her parents from her house in Alam Mesra here, watched by her two-year-old daughter Natasha.

Li Jin and her Malaysian husband Lee Kuok Tiung, a Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) communications programme lecturer, also have an eight-month-old son, Junichiro.

She last spoke to her parents, who are retired petroleum engineers, five days ago. At that time, they had told her that the situation appeared normal in Xinjiang province.

"But I became really worried when I saw TV reports of the violence in Urumqi on Monday evening, I couldn't make out which areas in Urumqi are affected."

Li Jin was among the inaugural batch of 37 China students who came to UMS in 2003 to pursue their studies. At the university where she studied human resource management, she met her future husband.

Five years prior to her arrival in Sabah she said similar violence broke out in her native Xinjiang province where people were injured by bombs filled with nails and buses which rammed into other vehicles.

The Malaysian Embassy in Beijing said there had been no reports about Malaysians' involvement in the riots in Urumqi.

"As far as I know, no Malaysian was caught up in the riots," Malaysian Ambassador to China Datuk Syed Norulzaman Syed Kamarulzaman said.

An official from the embassy in charge of consular matters said they have not received any news from their Chinese counterparts on Malaysians being injured or killed.

"Based on our records, there is no Malaysian living in Urumqi," she said, adding that the Government would not know about them if they had not registered with the embassy.