BEIJING — A man drove an electric tricycle packed with explosives into a crowd in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang on Thursday.
The blast, at the site of last summer’s massive ethnic riots, killed seven people and injured 14.
Xinjiang government spokeswoman Hou Hanmin said a man was apprehended at the scene, which occurred outside the city of Aksu in the southwestern part of the province, near China’s border with Kyrgyzstan. The suspect and victims were all Uighur, a Turkic-speaking minority native to the region. The local government declared martial law and deployed large numbers of police, according to reports.
Thursday’s incident came just after the first anniversary of one of the country’s worst instances of ethnic violence, when protests in Urumqi in July 2009 turned bloody and left 200 people dead and thousands wounded.
Some observers said the attack was an ominous sign of a renewed campaign of violence by separatists.
The attack took place in a remote but resource-rich province of China closer to Central Asia than to Beijing. The Uighur Muslims have long resented the tight grip the Chinese government has on the region, which began in the 1990s after the region had enjoyed decades of autonomy.
As a result of government efforts to bring the country under one rule and develop its western regions, Han Chinese, the ethnic group that makes up almost 80 percent of China’s population, have migrated to the region en masse.
