Attackers drove a vehicle into a government building in China’s unruly far western region of Xinjiang, setting off an explosive device and using knives to kill two people before all three of the assailants were shot dead, state media said yesterday.
Hundreds of people have been killed in recent years in resource-rich Xinjiang, on the borders of central Asia, in violence between the Muslim Uighur people, who call the region home, and the ethnic majority Han Chinese.
The government has blamed the unrest on Islamist militants, though rights groups and exiles say anger at Chinese controls on the religion and culture of Uighurs is more to blame for the unrest. China denies any repression in Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang government said in a short statement on its main news Web site the incident occurred just before 5pm on Wednesday in Karakax County, deep in southern Xinjiang’s Uighur heartland.
It said “thugs” drove a vehicle into a yard at the county Communist Party offices and detonated an “explosive device.”
The official Xinhua news agency, citing the Ministry of Public Security, later said all three of the attackers were shot dead, but not before they killed a security guard and a government official and wounded three others.
Xinhua described the incident as a “terrorist attack,” and said the attackers also used knives.
The Xinjiang government previously said there were four attackers and that they had only killed one person.
It is difficult for foreign journalists to report in Xinjiang, making it almost impossible to reach an independent assessment of security there.
Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the exiled group the World Uyghur Congress, said he doubted the official account.
“I strongly doubt the casualty toll and reason for the incident from official reports, which lack transparency,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
The government has delayed reporting some previous incidents.
An attack on a coal mine in September last year, in which at least 16 died, was not reported by the government until two months later, when it announced its security forces had killed 28 of the “terrorists” involved.
Xinjiang had generally been quiet this year, with no major reported attacks or other violent incidents.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion