The New York Times, 8 May 2014

HONG KONG — The police in Xinjiang, the far-western Chinese region beset by ethnic tensions, fatally shot one person and captured another on Thursday in the latest of a string of deadly confrontations there, state-run media reported on Thursday.

The incident in Aksu, a small city in the west of Xinjiang, came just over a week after two attackers with explosives and knives killed one person and wounded at least 79 others outside a train station in Urumqi, the regional capital. The two attackers also died, and the government indicated that they were Uighur militants influenced by religious extremism.

Xinjiang is the homeland of Uighurs, a largely Muslim people whose Turkic culture is much closer to that of the people of Central Asia than to China’s Han ethnic majority. Many Uighurs resent the growing Han presence in the region, and growing numbers have embraced more traditionalist forms of Islam and oppose state controls on religion.

The brief reports from Aksu described a confrontation with knives and a bomb, but did not give details of the suspects or their motives.

Acting on a tip, the police were checking a vehicle when the “suspects suddenly pulled out knives and attacked a police officer, and threw detonation devices toward a patrol vehicle,” reported Tianshan, an official online website for news about Xinjiang. The police fatally shot one person and captured another, said the report. An assistant to the police was badly injured, it said.

The bulletins did not describe the ethnicity of the assailants, nor did they suggest whether they were suspected militants. Aksu is a part of Xinjiang dominated by Uighurs. Once a majority in Xinjiang as a whole, Uighurs now make up less than half of the region’s 22 million residents.

President Xi Jinping of China underscored his worries about the persistent unrest and bloodshed in Xinjiang while visiting there in late April. During his visit, which ended on the same day as the attack at Urumqi train station, Mr. Xi urged integrating Uighurs into the mainstream of Chinese economic development, but he also vowed to deal harshly with separatist violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/world/asia/xinjiang-violence.html?_r=0