BEIJING: Riots in China’s ethnically divided Xinjiang region yesterday left 27 people dead, according to state media which said police opened fire on “knife-wielding mobs”.
It was the latest spasm of violence to hit the troubled western region, which is about twice the size of Turkey and is home to around nine million members of the mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.
Police shot at “mobs” who had attacked police stations, a local government building and a construction site.
“Seventeen people had been killed... before police opened fire and shot dead 10 rioters,” it said. The mobs were also “stabbing at people and setting fire to police cars”.
Nine police or security guards and eight civilians were killed before police opened fire, the report said, adding that three other people were taken to hospital with injuries.
The clashes occurred early yesterday in an area about 100 km (60 miles) from the desert city of Turpan and about 250 kilometres from the regional capital Urumqi.
The reason for the violence was not immediately clear, and police in Turpan refused to comment.
Many of Xinjiang’s Uighur community complain of religious and cultural repression by Chinese authorities.
Dilshat Rexit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group branded by Beijing as “separatist”, said “continued repression and provocation is the cause of conflict”.
Information about unrest in Xinjiang is tightly controlled by China’s ruling Communist Party -- and the government blocked Internet access across the region for several months following the clashes in 2009.
AFP
