The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2014

BEIJING–Police in China’s western region of Xinjiang thwarted what state media called a terrorist attack, shooting dead eight people after they rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into a column of police cars on patrol Friday.

A brief report on the Xinjiang government’s news website said three other people blew themselves up and police captured one assailant after the attack in Wushi County, near the border with Kazakhstan. The explosion set off by the attackers injured two officers and two bystanders and damaged five police vehicles, the account said.

Xinjiang–a strategic frontier territory that has oil and gas fields–has a long-running separatist movement against Chinese rule by a Turkic, traditionally Muslim ethnic group, the Uighurs. Violence has been on the rise in recent years, and experts cite the influence of more militant strains of . Uighur groups say increasingly heavy-handed policing and monitoring of religious activities is inciting a backlash.

In the latest incident, the government account didn’t identify the assailants. A report by the government news agency, Xinhua, described them as “terrorists.” Xinhua said the attackers rode motorbikes and cars that carried cylinders of liquefied natural gas.

Photos posted on the government site showed a jeep and a police van blackened by fire and their windshields blown out.

Wushi is located in Aksu Prefecture, where last month police shot six people for staging an attack on a police station, Xinhua said.

Write to Charles Hutzler at [email protected]

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