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BEIJING — A court in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang has sentenced two men to death for an attack in August that killed 17 paramilitary officers, according to a Wednesday report by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The court determined that the men, who carried out the attack on the morning of Aug. 4 in Kashgar, were trying to “sabotage the Beijing Olympic Games that began Aug. 8,” Xinhua reported.

The men, Abdurahman Azat, 33, and Kurbanjan Hemit, 28, are ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people. Some Uighurs advocate independence in Xinjiang and resent what they call discriminatory policies put in place by the ruling ethnic Han Chinese.

Most, if not all, of the paramilitary officers killed or wounded on Aug. 4 were Han Chinese.

Chinese officials had said that the men — a taxi driver and a vegetable vendor — had rammed a truck into a group of about 70 officers from the People’s Armed Police who were out for morning exercises and had then attacked the officers with machetes and homemade explosives.

Three foreign tourists who were across the street from the site of the assault gave different details of the attack to The New York Times. They confirmed that the truck plowed into the officers. But they said they did not hear multiple explosions afterward.

Furthermore, they said they saw paramilitary officers using machetes to attack what appeared to be other men with the same green security uniforms.

The Xinhua report gave no details on what kind of evidence was reviewed by the court in Kashgar during the trial of the two men. The New York Times