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BEIJING- Three security officers were killed in China's remote northwest on Tuesday, state media reported, raising the death toll from over a week of unrest there that has flared during the Olympics to 31.
Assailants jumped off a vehicle passing through a checkpoint in the Xinjiang region and stabbed to death four security officers, killing three of them and injuring the other, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The attack was the third in eight days in Xinjiang, a vast desert region bordering central Asia that is experiencing its biggest spike in violence in years.
Analysts attribute the surge to separatists from Xinjiang's repressed Muslim Uighur ethnic minority region seeking to raise publicity for their cause while world attention is on China for the Beijing Olympics, which began last week.
Xinhua said Tuesday's killings happened in Yamanya town, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) from Kashgar, one of Xinjiang's major cities where 16 policemen were murdered in the first attack on August 4.
China said terrorists seeking holy war carried out that attack, in which two assailants who were later captured drove a truck at a group of policemen, then attacked the officers with machetes and explosives.
The next flashpoint in Xinjiang was the city of Kuqa, where assailants targetted police and government offices, as well as public buildings, on Sunday.
One security guard was killed and 11 attackers died in those bombings and ensuing clashes with police, according to Xinhua.
It was not immediately clear how many people were involved in Tuesday's attack, according to Xinhua, which said the assailants remained at large.
Xinhua did not specify what organisation the security staff killed in the attack belonged to.
"We are now gathering further information about this issue. It's now under investigation," a police officer in Kashgar told AFP.
Various other authorities in Xinjiang could not immediately be reached for comment, hung up or said they did not know about the incident.
Xinjiang has about 8.3 million ethnic Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people many of whom express anger at what they say have been decades of repressive Communist Chinese rule. - AFP/vm
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