Chinese officials said on Sunday that the July 28 clashes in a remote town of the western Xinjiang region had left close to 100 people killed, marking the worst violence to hit the Muslim-majority region in more than five years.
Earlier this week, it emerged that a large mob armed with knives and axes attacked government offices, police stations and majority Han Chinese residents in two townships in Yarkand (Shache in Chinese), a county in the Kashgar Prefecture in Xinjiang’s west. Officials said after Monday’s violence that “dozens” had been killed in attacks by the mob and in firing by police, although they did not specify the number of casualties.
The regional government on Sunday said 37 civilians, of whom 35 were Han Chinese and two were Uighurs — the ethnic Turkic Muslim group native to Xinjiang — while 59 others were “gunned down by police”.
At least 215 others were arrested, suggesting that several hundred people were involved in what officials described as an “organised and premeditated” attack by “terrorists both in and outside China”.
Officials said the group had “set roadblocks” on highways to stop vehicles, and attacked passengers with knives. Some were seen carrying banners declaring “holy war”, officials were quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.
Authorities said they had identified “the mastermind” behind the attack as Nuramat Sawut, a Uighur who reportedly “had close connections” with the banned East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a terror group that is calling for an independent Xinjiang.
Officials said Sawut had been “spreading separatism and religious extremism with audio and video materials since 2013”.
“Through this process he developed a terrorist group and became its leader,” they said.
Authorities said the group had been planning the attack “through multiple gatherings in remote places since the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan”.
Separately, officials said they had shot dead nine “suspected terrorists” in Hotan, also in Xinjiang’s southwest, days after the government-appointed imam of the Id Kah, China’s largest mosque located in the nearby town of Kashgar was murdered after morning prayers.
The violence in Yarkand is the biggest since July 2009, when large scale riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese left at least 197 people killed.
Since then, Xinjiang has seen intermittent violence. The government has blamed the ETIM and other groups for organising the attacks, including knife attacks on train stations in Urumqi and Kunming, in southwestern Yunnan province. In May, a crowded market in Urumqi was attacked by men armed with explosives who drove vehicles into a crowd, killing at least 31 people.
