11 killed in Xinjiang police station attack

Eleven people were killed in an assault on a police station in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, the local government said Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks pointing to growing unrest in the area.

Two auxiliary police officers and nine attackers were killed in the incident Saturday afternoon, the Xinjiang regional government said in a statement posted on its microblog.

It said the assailants used knives and axes in the attack in Bachu county’s Serikbuya township, near the historic city of Kashgar, adding that two police officers were injured in the clash. Calls to government and police offices in the region rang unanswered Sunday.

U.S.-government funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia and a Uighur activist said several of the young attackers were killed by a police special weapons and tactics team, despite appeals from residents who had gathered at the scene urging the police to take them alive.

“There were around 40 to 50 people gathered around the station. They shouted to the police not to shoot, capture them alive and try them,” the broadcaster quoted an eyewitness as saying. The eyewitness was not identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Sweden-based activist Dilxat Raxit said security forces have been increasingly opting to shoot and kill suspects at the scene rather than capturing them and putting them on trial.

“Before, they’d put them on trial. You could argue about the fairness of the trial, but at least they were alive. Now, they’re just killing them outright,” Raxit said by phone. He said the tougher policy appeared to be aimed at intimidating Uighurs and preventing suspects from giving testimony.

“Now all of Bachu county is under lockdown, and any incident is suppressed by force,” Raxit said.

Xinjiang has long been home to a simmering insurgency against Chinese rule led by radicals among the region's native Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group.

This year has been particularly bloody, with a number of deadly clashes in Xinjiang and one in the heart of Beijing in which three attackers drove a vehicle through crowds in front of historic Tiananmen Gate, killing themselves and two tourists.

In April, 21 people died in Bachu county in what the government called a "terrorist attack."

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the main Uighur exile group, the World Uyghur Congress, said the last violence occurred after the police used electric rods to beat Uighurs, who went to protest at the police station, and then shot a protester dead.

The authorities blame the violence on Uighur terrorists allied with Al-Qaeda. Activists say despair over economic and social discrimination and cultural and religious restrictions are fueling anger among Uighurs.

Xinjiang is a sprawling region bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan and a number of unstable Central Asian states. It is home to about 9 million Uighurs, many of whom complain that they've been marginalized by policies favoring Han migrants.

Beijing says it treats all minorities fairly and spends billions of dollars on development and improving living standards in Xinjiang.

Al Jazeera and wire services