Beijing: China said that Islamic extremists were behind an attack on in Xinjiang that left 20 people dead on Sunday, news agencies reported on Monday.
“A group of religious extremists led by culprits trained in overseas terrorist camps were behind the weekend attack,” a Kashgar government statement said.
Captured suspects had confessed that the ringleaders had earlier fled to Pakistan and joined the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” and had received firearms and explosives training before infiltrating back into China, it said.
Earlier on Sunday, Chinese media reported that two men wielding knives attacked a truck driver and then a crowd of people following two explosions in Kashgar on Saturday night, leaving eight people dead including one of the attackers.
Knife attacks and blasts on Saturday and Sunday rocked the city of Kashgar, which lies a few hours’ away from China’s border with Azad Kashmir along the Karakoram Highway, leaving dozens injured in a crowded food market and in a busy downtown area.
The official Xinhua news agency said an initial probe had found that the attackers “had learned skills of making explosives and firearms in overseas camps of the terrorist group East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Pakistan,” before entering Xinjiang.
On Sunday, six civilians were killed and 15 others, including three policemen, injured after attackers, armed with knives, attacked a restaurant in downtown Kashgar. Five reported attackers were also shot dead by the police.
The State-run Global Times newspaper, citing an eyewitness, said the attackers were armed with guns.
Sunday’s violence followed a knife attack on Saturday night that left eight civilians killed and 27 others injured near a street market, after two armed suspects hijacked a truck and rammed it into pedestrians before attacking them with knives. Two blasts were also reported on Saturday, near the scene of the attack.
The incidents follow a July 21 attack on a police station in Hotan, also in Xinjiang, which left at least 18 people killed. The attack was first blamed by the Chinese government on “rioters”, but later described as “a severely violent terrorism case.”
Xinjiang has also seen recent incidents of ethnic unrest between the native Uighur Muslim population and increasing number of migrants of China’s majority Han Chinese group. While the Chinese government has blamed the unrest on Uighur separatist and terrorist groups, many Uighurs have also cited rising inequalities as stoking ethnic discord.
Following the Hotan attack, Chinese security analysts pointed to the role of separatist groups, based in Pakistan, in being behind the recent violence.
Pan Zhiping, director of the Institute of Central Asia at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times following the Hotan attack that in cities in southern Xinjiang close to China’s western border faced a “risk of being influenced by terrorists groups such as the ETIM”.
Mr. Pan told Xinhua on Monday overseas groups traditionally trained members for bombings before sending them to Xinjiang, but “more are using the Internet to penetrate the border”.
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