Seven people killed in Xinjiang violence
July 31, 2011 12:39 pm
======================================================Seven people have been killed in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang, the second time in a fortnight that deep-rooted tensions in the area have exploded into violence.
State media reported that two knife-wielding men hijacked a truck, killed its driver, and then drove the vehicle into a crowd, before attacking bystanders. Six people died before one attacker was killed and the other captured. At least 22 were left injured, government-run media said on Sunday.
The incident happened in the Silk Road city of Kashgar in northwest Xinjiang, a region troubled by ethnic violence in recent years.
Tianshannet, a Xinjiang government-run website, and the official Xinhua news agency, said the violence followed two explosions late on Saturday night. One of the blasts was from a minivan while another occurred in the street lined with food stalls where the hijacking took place, Xinhua said. Police said the motive was unclear.
Home to the most of China’s onshore energy reserves, Xinjiang is populated by Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking people, most of whom do not want to be part of China. Many resent the growing presence of majority Han Chinese who have moved there.
Two years ago Uighurs turned on their Han Chinese neighbours in Urumqi, the regional capital, killing close to 200 people, most of them Han. It was the worst ethnic violence for decades in Xinjiang.
The Kashgar unrest was the second incident of serious violence in the region in two weeks. On July 18, at least 20 people were killed in an attack on a police station in Hotan, a remote oasis town.
State media quoted an official in Xinjiang as saying that clash was a “terrorist” attack. Residents said the attackers briefly replaced the People’s Republic of China flag on the police station’s roof with the blue half moon flag of East Turkestan used by the advocates of an independent Uighur state.
Zhao Genlin, deputy party secretary of the Hotan city police, told the Financial Times that the attack was the worst violence Hotan experienced since a riot in 1999. “It seems that terrorism cannot be rooted out in Xinjiang, but look at Afghanistan or Iraq. They are struggling with the same problem,” Mr Zhao said.
In the latest attack, Xinhua said the attackers struck pedestrians as they were trying to escape but Tianshannet.com said they deliberately drove the truck into the crowd. The crowd retaliated, beating one of the attackers to death and capturing the other, according to that account.
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