Last Updated,Wednesday, 12:02 p.m. | As my colleague Austin Ramzy reports, immediately after a fatal car crash near Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Monday, Chinese officials scrambled to clear every trace of the incident from the physical site and government censors scrubbed the Sina Weibo social network of images uploaded by witnesses.

Chinese bloggers, however, moved quickly to make copies of the images and share them on Twitter and other social networks outside the control of the authorities in Beijing. Within an hour of the crash, Zhao Jing, a prominent Internet commentator (and former New York Times employee) who blogs as Michael Anti, began sharing screenshots of the Weibo images captured by other bloggers on his Twitter feed.

As The Shanghaiist reported, the earliest and most dramatic images to appear on Weibo were a series of photographs uploaded by a blogger who uses the handle @Jing_oppa, showing the flaming wreckage of a sport utility vehicle directly in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in the square.

Malcolm Moore, The Daily Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, shared a copy of another image deleted from Weibo, which showed a woman being helped to her feet by an officer, said to have been taken just after the vehicle careered through the a crowd of pedestrians near the square.

Pic allegedly posted by a witness at the scene, right after the crash in Tiananmen Sq //t.co/JrOE5N5L78 — malcolmmoore (@MalcolmMoore) 28 Oct 13

Although the police used their Weibo account to make the public aware of the crash, and the temporary closing of the square, Mr. Moore reported a short time later that government censors did not appreciate his attempts to use the social network to contact witnesses.

We’ve been trying to contact witnesses to the Tiananmen Sq crash over Weibo. Our Weibo account now suspended. — malcolmmoore (@MalcolmMoore) 28 Oct 13

While accounts and images of the incident were being erased from Chinese web sites, reporters for Western publications reported sardonically from the scene on the rapid and thorough scrubbing of the crash site, which took place out of view, behind large screens.

The scene outside Tiananmen a minute ago. Clean up in progress. //t.co/wI1cty3Co1 — Philip Wen (@PhilipWen11) 28 Oct 13

Nothing to see here, go back to your homes MT @anguswalkeritv: All evidence of the car on fire has been scrubbed away //t.co/YmcwPI1Ts8 — Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) 28 Oct 13

Tiananmen right now…as if nothing happened. Plainclothes chatting…tourist taking seflies Pic Via @ananthkrishnan //t.co/YKGxuAlUNf — Karson Yiu (@karsonwhy) 28 Oct 13

Although foreign correspondents in Beijing reported that state news broadcasts did not mention the incident, the information blackout did not extend to all Chinese news sites.

No mention of Tiananmen Sq incident on China’s main state-run evening news. Censors in overdrive deleting theories/pix on social media. — Mark Stone (@Stone_SkyNews) 28 Oct 13

Caixin, a Chinese business magazine, also used five of the images deleted from Weibo to illustrate reports on the incident in both English and Chinese.

Chinese state television’s English-language channel also broadcast a video report on the incident that referred to, but did not show, “flames and thick smoke in the very heart of the Chinese capital” in “photos captured by passers-by.”

Twelve hours after the crash, a news report on the incident could also be found on Youku, a Chinese video-sharing site modeled on YouTube, which included some of the more distant images of smoke from the wreckage from Weibo. (After this post was originally published, that report was also deleted from Youku.)

Journalists from Agence France-Presse did manage to record some video of the crash aftermath, before being blocked from filming by officers.

Huang Lisha, a Chinese researcher for the British newspaper The Times, later shared a link to video of the flaming wreckage obtained from a witness.

Exclusive video of Oct. 28 Tiananmen car crash accident acquired by The Times //t.co/rR53a3la8I no pay wall — 莎莎/Huang Lisha (@huanglisha) 29 Oct 13

Among the other photographs removed from Weibo on Monday, according to the monitoring site FreeWeibo, were archival images shared on Twitter by Patrick Boehler, a journalist at The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, which showed a fatal car crash in roughly the same location in 1982.