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BEIJING : Two policemen were killed and five others injured in China's restive Xinjiang region, authorities said Friday, bringing the reported death toll from a wave of unrest there this month to 33.
Assailants stabbed the police officers late on Wednesday night in a town close to Kashgar, a city in the far west of Xinjiang where the deadliest of this month's attacks took place, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
"Suddenly, many criminal suspects that had been hiding in a cornfield came out from behind and attacked using knives," Xinhua said, citing local police.
Xinhua gave few other details but US-funded Radio Free Asia reported the police were ambushed while searching the cornfield following a tip that a woman suspected of helping assailants in an earlier attack was hiding there.
"We didn't expect to come under attack in that cornfield," Radio Free Asia quoted a local policeman named Omerjan as saying.
Analysts have said Xinjiang is enduring its worst violence in years, partly triggered by separatists wanting to raise publicity while the world spotlight was focused on China for the Beijing Olympics, which ended on Sunday.
Xinjiang is a vast area bordering central Asia with about 8.3 million ethnic Muslim Uighurs, many of whom say they have suffered decades of repression under communist Chinese rule.
China has blamed Uighur "terrorists" for much of the previous unrest this month.
In the first of the reported incidents, Chinese authorities said two assailants murdered 16 policemen on August 4 in Kashgar.
The attackers, who were later captured, drove a truck at a group of policemen, then attacked the officers with machetes and explosives, according to the official account.
Also near Kashgar, three security officers were killed on August 12 when assailants jumped off a vehicle passing through a checkpoint and stabbed them, according to Xinhua..
Eleven attackers and one security guard were reported killed in bombings and a shoot-out with police on August 10 in the remote city of Kuqa.
Exiled Uighur organisations and rights groups have reported that a massive security crackdown in Xinjiang in the months leading up the Olympics has remained in place after the Games.
- AFP /ls
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