BEIJING — Attackers armed with Molotov cocktails and explosives stormed a police station in China’s Muslim province of Xinjiang on Monday, killing and wounding several police officers, taking hostages and setting the building on fire, according to a local official and a report from the state-run news agency Xinhua.
Several attackers and some hostages were killed when police converged on the besieged police station, in the crowded “grand bazaar” area in the city of Hotan, and several bystanders in a nearby commercial building were also injured, according to the spokeswoman, Hou Hanmin of the Xinjiang information department.
“A member of the armed police, a security personnel and two hostages were killed during the ordeal,” according to the Xinhua report, citing unnamed sources with China’s Public Security Ministry. “The police quickly converged on the scene and shot a number of rioters while freeing six hostages.”
The precise number of attackers and the number of casualties were not immediately clear.
“The thugs began to throw the Molotov cocktails as they rushed into the first floor of the police station, and then they raided the second floor,” Hou said. “The hostages, as far as I know, are all ordinary people who were doing business in the police station.”
By evening, the Chinese government’s censors began blocking the words “Xinjiang,” “Hotan” and “riot” from the search engines of the most popular microblogging sites.
The attack marks one of the most serious eruptions of violence since July 2009, when rioting between Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese left nearly 200 people dead and many shops and other businesses burned.
Violent attacks like the one on the police station are rare in China but not unheard of. Previous incidents in Xinjiang have mostly involved roadside bombs or assailants detonating vehicle-borne devices near police patrols.
Turkic-speaking Uighurs are upset at Chinese migration into what they consider their traditional Muslim homeland, where Muslims are now outnumbered by Han Chinese.
The Beijing authorities have blamed the previous unrest on “terrorists” seeking the independence of the Xinjiang region from China.
