BEIJING — Chinese state media said Wednesday that 14 rioters were shot dead earlier this week after storming a police station in the country’s far west.
It was the first official death toll for the rioters, who according to state media reports occupied a police station on Monday and hacked t
o death a security guard. The official Xinhua News Agency said a police officer, a woman and a teenage girl taken hostage by the rioters were also killed.
Xinhua said the rioters threw gasoline bottles and rocks at police, destroyed equipment and set fire to the station in Hotan city in the Xinjiang region. When the attackers ran to the top floor, police opened fire on them, it said.
While some state media have labeled the incident a terrorist attack, others have blamed it on rioters or thugs.
The attackers were aged between 20 and 40 and shouted “Allah the only God” as they took over the station, Xinhua said, citing local Communist Party and police officials who were not identified by name.
Xinjiang has been beset by ethnic conflict and a sometimes-violent separatist movement by Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs), a largely Muslim ethnic group that sees Xinjiang as its homeland. Many Uighurs resent the Han Chinese majority as interlopers.
Hotan is an oasis town of more than 115,000 people in the southern part of Xinjiang, not far from the border with Pakistan. The Global Times newspaper said more than 90 percent of the population is Uighur.
A Xinjiang government spokesman on Tuesday called the latest incident an “organized terrorist attack” and Chinese-language media on Wednesday continued to refer to it as terrorism. However, Xinhua’s English-language report referred to the men as rioters.
A Xinjiang government official who would only give his surname, Yang, declined to answer questions about the attack and requested queries be sent by fax. There was no immediate response.
A Germany-based Uighur exile group, the World Uyghur Congress, said the violence erupted when more than 100 Uighurs gathered to protest a police crackdown in the city. Demonstrators were demanding to know the status of relatives who had allegedly gone missing into police custody, the group said.
Two years ago in Xinjiang’s regional capital of Urumqi, simmering tensions erupted in the region’s worst ethnic violence in more than a decade. Uighurs attacked Han Chinese, overturning buses and cars and torching shops in a riot the government says killed 197 people, mostly Hans. In the aftermath, hundreds were arrested in a region-wide crackdown and about two dozen sentenced to death. Many other Uighurs remain unaccounted for and are believed to be in custody.
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