BEIJING: In a brazen attack, three suspected Uyghur militants crashed a vehicle into the ruling Communist Party’s office in the restive Xinjiang province and set off an explosive device, killing two persons before being shot dead by the police.
The car carrying the attackers crashed into the yard of the office building of the local Communist Party committee in Karakax county and “detonated an explosive device”.
The attack killed an official and a security guard and injured three others.
Police shot and killed the three attackers, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Previous reports said the attack was carried out by four people, causing one innocent person’s death.
Social order had been restored, a website of the Xinjiang government said, adding without identifying the attackers.
The attack was reported after several months of lull in terrorist violence in the province where the Uyghur Muslims were restive for years over the settlements of majority Han Chinese in the resource-rich province, bordering Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Afghanistan.
China has been blaming separatist outfit, East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), for the violent attacks in the province and the rest of the country.
ETIM was blamed for suicide blast in the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan in September this year in which one person was killed and five others injured.
In November 2015, 28 suspected militants were killed over the course of a 56-day manhunt following an attack on a colliery in Aksu two months earlier that left 16 people dead.
In March 2014, 31 people were knifed to death at a train station in Kunming, in southwestern China, with four attackers killed.
Xinjiang had generally been quiet in 2016 with no major reported attacks or other violent incidents.–PTI
