DUSHANBE, July 30, 2014, Asia-Plus — Dozens of people have been killed or injured in violence in China”s Xinjiang region, China’s state-run media say.
Xinhua news agency, in particular, said a knife-wielding gang attacked a police station and government offices in Shache county early on Monday. Local Uighurs as well as Han Chinese were among the casualties. Police shot dead many attackers, Xinhua said.
Xinhua said that more than 30 police cars had been damaged or destroyed in the “terror attack,” six of them burnt out. Quoting local police, it said “dozens of Uighur and Han civilians were killed or injured.”
According to Xinhua, the gang began their attack in the township of Elixku before moving to another nearby settlement, attacking civilians and vehicles on the way.
BBC News quoted a Chinese official as saying that 13 Han Chinese people had been killed in the outbreak of violence, the latest to hit the troubled region.
BBC News reports that US-based activist group The Uyghur American Association, however, citing unidentified local sources, said that local Uighurs were protesting “against Chinese security forces” heavy-handed Ramadan crackdown… and extrajudicial use of lethal force in recent weeks in the county.”
On July 18, the association reportedly noted that a Uighur family had been killed in a nearby township. Many other families had subsequently fled to Elixku, where Monday”s protest erupted.
Neither account can be independently confirmed and it is not clear why official media took so long to report the violence, BBC News reported, noting that Shache county, also called Yarkant county, lies in Xinjiang”s far west near the border with Tajikistan.
Tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese migrants have been rumbling for years, with some Uighurs opposing Chinese rule in Xinjiang.
