An assailant drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a crowd near Aksu, Xinjiang, killing seven military police. Reuters reports:
Police arrested a Uighur suspect who drove the motorized three-wheel vehicle into a group of police and paramilitary guards at a highway intersection in Yiganqi township near the city of Aksu, according to a report from a local news conference carried on the People’s Daily website.
It was the first such attack in China since 2008.
In separate incidents during the Olympic Games in Beijing, Uighur attackers killed police at a border checkpoint near Pakistan and rammed a truck into a group of paramilitary police in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar.
Fourteen other people were injured in Thursday’s attack, Xinjiang government spokeswoman Hou Hanmin told a group of foreign journalists visiting the regional capital, Urumqi.
See also reports from the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times.
Update: AFP has more details:
Authorities in China’s restive Xinjiang region believe two suspects, a man and a woman, were behind an explosion that killed seven people and injured 14 others, state media reported Friday.
The pair allegedly tossed explosives from a three-wheeled vehicle into a crowd on Thursday in the suburbs of the city of Aksu, not far from the border with Kyrgyzstan, the Xinhua news agency and Global Times newspaper said.
Five people died at the scene and two others died later in hospital, the report said. The female suspect died in the incident, though it was not immediately clear if she was included in the death toll of seven.
