6 bombers shot dead in Xinjiang
Print Edition
POLICE in China’s far-western Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region shot dead six attackers who were armed with explosive devices yesterday.
There were no police or civilian casualties, the local government said.
A suspect with an explosive device was spotted by local residents at about 10:10am in a commercial district in Shule County, near the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.
They called police, who opened fire after the would-be bomber charged at them with an ax and attempted to detonate the device, according to Xinjiang’s government-run Tianshan news site.
As police conducted a cleanup operation, another five attackers attempted to ignite explosive devices attached to their bodies. They were killed by the police on the spot.
A minibus with explosive devices was also spotted at the site.
In a previous outbreak of violence in Shule in 2008, at the time of the Olympic Games in Beijing, three security officers were stabbed to death and another wounded by terrorists.
Violence linked to Xinjiang has intensified over the past year, with at least 200 people killed in a series of terrorist attacks and increasingly sophisticated assaults in the region and beyond.
Homemade explosive devices have often featured in the violence, which has ranged from assaults on police stations to knife attacks on travelers at a railway station.
China has launched a severe crackdown in recent months on religious extremists, separatists and terrorists, with hundreds of arrests and around 50 executions and death sentences announced since June.
In December, a court in Urumqi, the regional capital, sentenced eight people to death for two deadly attacks, at the city’s main train station and at a market.
On Saturday, Xinjiang’s legislature voted to ban the wearing of burqas in public in Urumqi. It said the measure is “an effort to curb growing extremism that forced Uygur women to abandon their colorful traditional dress and wear black burqas.”
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