Kuqa: Attackers hurled homemade bombs at government buildings in western China on Sunday, wounding three officers said the state media, amid tightened security following an attack days before the Beijing Olympics opened and threats by a militant group to disrupt the Summer Games.
It was unclear how many assailants were involved in the pre-dawn explosions in Kuqa, a county in the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang, but the official Xinhua News Agency said police shot dead five of the suspects.
The bombings are the second attack in Xinjiang in a week. Two men last Monday rammed a truck and threw explosives at paramilitary police, killing 16.
Together the acts mark a dramatic uptick in violence in Xinjiang. Local Muslims have waged a sputtering rebellion against Chinese rule but heavy security had largely succeeded in suppressing the violence over the past decade.
Citing the public security bureau of the Xinjiang region, Xinhua said the attackers flung homemade explosives at the local police station and office of industry and commerce, from inside a taxi. Two police officers and a security guard were wounded while two police cars were destroyed in the blasts, it said.
A man who answered the phone at the Kuqa county government's duty office said he was not aware of the explosions and refused to give his name. Repeated calls to the county's public security bureau rang unanswered.
A woman who was on duty at the emergency unit of the Kuqa People's Hospital said one man was pronounced dead upon arrival and that others were being treated, but gave no details.
''There were several explosions in several places in the county seat of Kuqa this morning and we heard them from the hospital,'' said woman, who would only give her last name, Tian.
Already normally tight security in Xinjiang was heightened in the past week after assailants killed 16 border police and wounded 16 others in the city of Kashgar on August 4 when they rammed a stolen truck into the group before tossing homemade bombs and stabbing them.
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In Kuqa on Sunday, police had sealed off a six-lane thoroughfare leading into the city from the airport with two strands of white plastic tape. A uniformed policeman stood in the middle of the road preventing unauthorized vehicles from passing, and was seen lifting up the tape to allow a police car to go through. A crowd of about 15 people stood on the side of the road watching.
Due to the lockdown, two Hong Kongers, two Britons and an Australian were unable to leave the city, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement. A man at the front desk of the Kuqa Hotel who declined to give his name said by telephone that 20 South Korean travelers in a tour group were still at the hotel.
The Hong Kong group said 10,000 security personnel have been deployed to block access into the downtown area, but local authorities could not be reached to confirm the figure.
Kuqa is 460 miles (740 kilometers) southwest of Urumqi, the regional capital.
The latest violence comes after two Americans closely linked to the US Olympic volleyball team were stabbed, one fatally, in a bizarre attack Saturday in the Chinese capital on the first day of the Beijing Games.
The explosions also come after an Islamic group seeking independence for Xinjiang threatened Thursday to attack buses, trains and planes during the two-week Olympic competition.
A videotape purportedly made by the Turkistan Islamic Party, a militant group seeking independence for Xinjiang, was released with threats of attacks during the Olympics. The group is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, where security experts say core members have received training from al-Qaida.
''The Chinese have done a lot to improve the security situation in Xinjiang but the threat in Xinjiang is significant so there will be a number of attacks in China during the Olympics and after,'' said Rohan Gunaratna of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.
''But it is very difficult for the terrorist groups to attack in Beijing because of the extensive security measures,'' he added.
Xinjiang is a massive, rugged territory — one-sixth of China's land mass — that's home to the Uighurs, a Muslim minority with a long history of tense relations with the Chinese.
The Uighurs, with a population of about 8 million, have complained that the Communist government has been restricting their religion and Turkic culture.
''We have been appealing to Beijing to solve the issue through political dialogue to prevent the situation from deteriorating, but they have never taken it seriously,'' Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Germany-based pro-independence World Uighur Congress, said in an e-mail.
''On the contrary, they heightened the suppression. Beijing should be directly responsible for today's incident,'' he added.
Beijing has accused Uighur groups of using terrorism in a violent campaign to split Xinjiang from the rest of the country. China's state-run media have reported sporadic bombings, shootings and riots in the territory over the years, but the dispatches are often sketchy and difficult to verify.
A county of 400,000 people, Kuqa is a popular tourist destination in Xinjiang and is rich in oil and gas resources.
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