More than 31 people have died and 90 have been injured in an attack in the capital of Xinjiang province in western China on Thursday, the most recent in a series of violent incidents. The Chinese government has pointed fingers at the radical Muslim separatists following the attack.
China’s Xinhua News Agency said the assailants plowed through crowds of shoppers in off-road vehicles and threw explosives out the windows before crashing head-on in the attack in the city of Urumqi. The agency said one of the vehicles exploded and an eyewitness says there were up to a dozen blasts in all.
“I heard four or five explosions. I was very scared. I saw three or four people lying on the ground,” Fang Shaoying, the owner of a small supermarket located near the scene of the blast mentioned.
The Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”
It was not instantly clear who was responsible for the attack. Recent violence has been blamed on extremists aiming to overthrow Chinese rule in the region, which is home to the native Turkic-speaking Uighurs, 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 nearly 200 people dead. Thursday’s attack also was the bloodiest single act of violence in Xinjiang in recent history.
Photos from the scene showed at least three people lying on the street with a large fire in the distance depositing huge plumes of smoke. Others were sitting on the roadway in shock, with vegetables, boxes and stools strewn around them. Police in helmets and body armour were seen manning road blocks as police cars, ambulances and fire trucks arrived at the scene.
In response to Thursday’s attack, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to “severely punish terrorists and spare no efforts in maintaining stability.”
Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun, China’s top police official, was also dispatched to Urumqi at the head of a team to investigate.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the incident “lays bare again the anti-human, anti-social and anti-civilization nature of the violent terrorists and deserves the condemnation of the world community and the Chinese people.”
“The Chinese government is confident and capable of cracking down on violent terrorists. Their plots will never succeed,” Hong said.
Tensions between Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang have been going on for years, but recent attacks show an audaciousness and deliberateness that wasn’t present before. They are also increasingly going after civilians, rather than the police and government targets.
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