BEIJING: Two men wielding knives attacked a truck driver and then a crowd of people following two explosions in China’s far west, leaving eight people dead including one of the attackers, government-run media reported on Sunday.
The blasts and attack occurred late yesterday in the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang region near China’s border with Tajikistan, according to tianshannet.com, a Xinjiang government-run website, and the state-run news agency Xinhua.
One of the blasts was from a minivan while another occurred in a food market, Xinhua said.
There were few other details from the reports, but a group of exiles said martial law had been imposed in Kashgar and that at least 100 people had been arrested.
Xinjiang is home to many Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking people native to the region, many of whom resent the growing presence of majority Han Chinese who have moved there. Some Uigher groups have campaigned for independence. It was the second incident of serious violence in the region in two weeks.
Eighteen people including 14 ”rioters” were killed in an attack on a police station in Xinjiang on July 18, according to the government.
The dead included two policemen and two hostages in what Chinese authorities described as a terrorist attack. That clash was the worst violence in about a year in Xinjiang.
Saturday’s attacks began with the two blasts, Xinhua said. (UNI)
Two men jumped into a truck waiting at a stoplight and stabbed to death the driver, Xinhua and tianshannet.com said.
The pair then ploughed into a crowd, left the truck and started attacking people, killing six, Xinhua said.
The crowd retaliated, beating one of the attackers to death and capturing the other, according to the accounts, which did not further identify the attackers.
Twenty-eight people were hospitalised, it said.
There were no other immediate details. The reports did not say if authorities suspect there is any link to a Uighur separatist movement or to the July 18 attack.
”The entire city of Kashgar is under martial law, and authorities have arrested at least 100 Uighers,” the German-based World Uyghur Congress said.
”There is no way to protest peacefully the Chinese suppression there, and the policy of calculated resettlement,” group spokesman Dilxat Raxit said in a statement sent by email to Reuters, referring to ethnic Han Chinese being relocated to live in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is strategically significant because it is adjacent to Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and it has oil, gas and coal deposits. REUTERS
