adminAt least 31 people have been killed and more than 90 injured after two vehicles ploughed into a market and explosives were thrown in China’s restive Xinjiang region, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Two off-road vehicles drove into a crowd in the regional capital Urumqi yesterday, with one of them exploding, Xinhua said, in what state-run media called the latest “serious terrorist incident” to hit Xinjiang, home to mostly Muslim Uighurs.
The owner of a small business told Xinhua he had heard a dozen big bangs.
Pictures posted on Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, purported to show victims lying in a tree-lined street. Flames rose in the background, while other images showed smoke billowing over market stalls behind a police roadblock.
Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Nanning, said two four-wheel drive cars ploughed into the market and that the explosion appears to have been “very large”.
“This is going to come as a shock to the ordinary Chinese people because they are just not used to this kind of thing,” he said.
Brown said Guo Shengkun, the public security minister, was on his way to the region to assess the situation. He said information from Xinjiang is tightly controlled by the government, making it hard to establish the exact scale of the attack. — Al Jazeera
derick.khumalo