| |
BEIJING: Chinese police killed six people and arrested three others during a clash in the restive Muslim northwest region of Xinjiang, state media reported on Saturday.
Police carried out an operation late Friday in Kashgar prefecture in the far west of Xinjiang against a group of people suspected of involvement in an attack on August 12 in which three security guards were killed, the Xinhua and China News agencies said.
They discovered the nine suspects armed with knives in a corn field, where they resisted arrest and injured two members of the security forces, the agencies said.
The police fought back, killing six of the suspects and wounding the three others.
Local police contacted by AFP Saturday refused to comment on the reported clash in the remote region which borders Central Asia.
Xinjiang has suffered a wave of violence over the past month, with 16 policemen killed on August 4 in Kashgar in the most deadly attack.
Six days later, an attack on a police station in Kuqa resulted in the deaths of 10 of the attackers and a security guard.
In the August 12 incident, three security guards were killed and a fourth wounded by knife-wielding assailants during an attack on a checkpoint at Yamanya, a town 30 kilometres from Kashgar.
On Wednesday two policemen were killed and five wounded while searching a corn field near Kashgar for a suspect connected with an earlier attack.
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.
Many of Xinjiang's 8.3 million Turkic-speaking ethnic Muslim Uighurs say they have suffered decades of repression under communist Chinese rule.
Chinese authorities have blamed much of the recent violence on Xinjiang's East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which is listed by China and the United Nations as a terrorist organisation.
- AFP/yb
|
