BEIJING, May 22 (AP): Assailants in two SUVs plowed through shoppers while setting off explosives on a busy street market in China’s volatile northwestern region of Xinjiang on Thursday, the local officials said, killing 31 people and injuring more than 90.
The attack in the city of Urumqi was the bloodiest in a series of violent incidents that Chinese authorities have blamed on radical separatists from the country’s Muslim Uighur minority. The Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”
The two vehicles crashed through barriers at 7:50 a.m., drove right into the crowds while setting off explosives, the statement said. The SUVs then crashed head-on and one of them exploded, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack. Recent violence has been blamed on extremists seeking to overthrow Chinese rule in the region, which is home to the native Turkic-speaking Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs) but has seen large inflows from China’s ethnic Han majority in recent decades.
The death toll was the highest for a violent incident in Xinjiang since dayslong riots in Urumqi in 2009 between Uighurs and Hans left almost 200 people dead. Thursday’s attack also was the bloodiest single act of violence in Xinjiang in recent history.
The station attack and other violence have been blamed on Uighur extremists, but information about events in the area, which is about 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) west of Beijing, is tightly controlled. Tensions between Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang have been simmering for years, but recent attacks — while still relatively crude — show an audaciousness and deliberateness that wasn’t present before. They are also increasingly going after civilians, rather than the police and government targets of past years.
In an unprecedented incident last year, three Uighurs rammed a vehicle into crowds in a suicide attack near the Forbidden City gate in the heart of Beijing, killing themselves and two tourists. And in March, 29 people were slashed and stabbed to death at a train station in the southern city of Yunnan blamed on Uighur extremists bent on waging jihad.
Uighur activists say the violence is being fueled by restrictive and discriminatory policies and practices directed at Uighurs and a sense that the benefits of economic growth have largely accrued to Chinese migrants while excluding Uighurs. The knowledge that Muslims elsewhere are rising up against their governments also seems to be contributing to the increased militancy.
Thursday’s attack came two days after courts in Xinjiang sentenced 39 people to prison after being convicted of crimes including organizing and leading terrorist groups, inciting ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination and the illegal manufacturing of guns.
