In a major “terrorist” attack, 50 people including 40 “rioters” were killed in a series of explosions targeting a fair and police stations in China’s restive Xinjiang province where the country is battling an upsurge in separatist violence by ethnic Muslim Uygurs.
Forty rioters died in a series of explosions in luntai County of northwest China’s Xinjiang on Sunday, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday providing sketchy details about the deadly attack.
Also six civilians and four policemen were killed in the explosions. Two rioters were captured by the police, it quoted a local, official Tianshan website reported. The blasts hit a shop, an open fair and two police stations around 5 pm on Sunday, the website said. Xinjiang police said it was an “organised and serious terrorist” attack. The province’s native Muslim Uygur population is restive over the increasing settlements of Han Chinese from other provinces is experiencing series of violent attacks for the past years. China blames the al-Qaeda-backed East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for instigating the violence. A series of terror attacks in Xinjiang have rocked China this year, with the latest in early August when 37 civilians were killed Shache County of Kashgar Prefecture. On September 12, three Muslim Uygur men from Xinjiang were sentenced to death and a woman jailed for life, for their involvement in the deadly mass stabbings of passengers at a railway station in southern China in which 31 people were killed.
The incident occurred on March 1 when a group of assailants armed with knives attacked civilians at Kunming city’s railway station hacking everyone who came their way. So far police in Xinjiang claim to have cracked more than 200 terror cases this year.