Suspect Killed, Another Captured After Clash With Police in Xinjiang
The Wall Street Journal, 8 May 2014
SHANGHAI—A suspect was killed and another captured after a clash with police in northwest China’s Xinjiang region on Thursday, state media said. An officer was severely injured.
The incident in the remote Xinjiang city of Aksu comes on the heels of larger-scale violence in other Chinese cities that police blamed on separatists and religious extremists from Xinjiang. The suspects in Thursday’s incident weren’t identified. But China has faced a long-running rebellion by some Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, mainly Muslim ethnic group, and the government in recent years has reported numerous similar, small-scale attacks by Uighurs on security forces stationed there.
According to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, police on Thursday were inspecting a vehicle they considered suspicious early in the afternoon when two suspects brandishing knives surprised them and hurled “burning devices” at their vehicles. The report said police fought back by shooting one of the assailants and capturing the other.
More unusual, according to analysts who study the region, were other attacks that targeted civilians, including at railway stations in cities outside Xinjiang. In particular, they cited a March 1 knifing at the main train station in the southern city Kunming that left more than 30 dead and 130 injured. This week, a man whose identity wasn’t made public was blamed for knifing passersby at a train station in Guangzhou, a southeastern city.
Chinese President Xi Jinping in recent weeks has spoken repeatedly about the need to pacify Xinjiang and separatists there by combining tougher security plus more efforts to promote ethnic harmony and national unity.
The president took that message to Xinjiang itself last week. Hours after he left the provincial capital Urumqi police say two Uighur men detonated explosives and knifed people at a train station there. Three people were killed, including the suspected assailants, and almost 80 injured.
One of the suspects in the Urumqi attack was from Aksu, the site of Thursday’s incident. During his tour, Mr. Xi didn’t visit that city, a southern outpost in a region more than twice the size of Texas.
Dilshat Rexit, a German-based spokesman for the exile group World Uyghur Congress, said he understood that the people involved in Thursday’s incident were ethnic Uighurs. While he said it is difficult to draw direct links between the attacks, he said government policies in Aksu and other cities in the region benefit the Han Chinese, not Uighurs.
—Yang Jie in Beijing
Write to James T. Areddy at [email protected]