Deadly violence rocks China's restive Xinjiang, 20 killed

BEIJING: The Chinese government on Tuesday said attackers wielding knives killed 13 people in China's Xinjiang region before police shot seven of them dead. These were the latest attacks in the ethnically divided northwestern area.
The Xinjiang government said the killings on Tuesday night occurred on a busy pedestrian street in Yecheng County near Kashgar, a city in the south of Xinjiang that has been beset by tension between the mainly Muslim Uighur people and Han Chinese. "Nine violent terrorists suddenly surged into the crowd and stabbed to death innocent people with their knives, causing 13 innocent people to die and injuring many," the government said in a statement on official news portal www.tianshannet.com. "Police rushed to the scene, handled the situation with resolution and shot dead seven violent terrorists, capturing two," it added.
The regional government did not identify any of the attackers or give their ethnicity. Nor did it identify the ethnicity of their victims. Yecheng, also known by its Uighur name of Kargilik, is close to the disputed region of Kashmir, which is partly controlled by India and partly by Pakistan. China has blamed earlier incidents of violence on religious hardliners who want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan. Some Chinese officials have also blamed attacks on Muslim militants trained in Pakistan.
But exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say China overstates the threat posed by militants in Xinjiang, which sits astride south and central Asia. "China's demonstrated lack of transparency when it comes to unrest in East Turkestan necessitates deep speculation of official Chinese claims," Uyghur American Association president Alim Seytoff said in an emailed statement.
"In the absence of compelling evidence, international observers should be extremely careful when hearing Chinese claims about 'rioters' and 'terrorists'." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the Yecheng incident should not be overblown.
"The overall situation in Xinjiang is good," Hong told a daily news briefing. "We firmly oppose a small group of violent terrorists and separatists destroying this kind of peaceful development and the calm ... conditions." Security expert Li Wei was quoted as saying in a separate Xinjiang government statement that such incidents did not mean China was in danger of losing control. "There are still some unfavourable facts affecting Xinjiang's stability which have not been eliminated, so occasional incidents are hard to avoid," Li said. "Xinjiang's stability is firm."
Uighurs account for just over 40 percent of the region's 21 million people. But they are the majority in Kashgar and other parts of the region's south and many are against the government controls on their culture and religion. The Global Times, a tabloid published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, cited experts as saying that Yecheng was in the front line of China's campaign against militancy because of its location. "Over recent years it has had rather a large number of bad incidents and is an important area for maintaining stability in Xinjiang," Tuerwenjiang Tuerxun of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences said in a report on the paper's website. "It is close to the border, has been quote shut-off and remote for a long time, and is also quite a sensitive place," he added. reuters

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