Thirty-one people were killed and more than 90 injured in an attack Thursday on a busy street market in the capital of China's volatile north western region of Xinjiang, the local government said, the bloodiest in a series of violent incidents blamed on radical separatist Muslims.
The Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack in the city of Urumqi was "a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature."
The assailants crashed through metal barriers in a pair of SUVs at 7:50 a.m. and plowed through crowds of shoppers while setting off explosives, the statement said.
The vehicles then crashed head-on and one of them exploded, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It quoted an eyewitness as saying there were up to a dozen blasts in all.
At least 31 people have been killed and houses and vehicles were burnt after a disagreement over ownership of a football pitch set off sectarian violence in northern Nigerian state of Taraba.
Violence erupted when Muslim and Christian football teams argued over which team had the right to a football pitch.
Scores were also injured in the fracas which the state acting governor Garba Umar tried to quell by declaring a round-the-clock curfew in the Wukari city where the crisis emanated late yesterday.
Residents of Wukari were forced to flee their homes to take refuge in neighbouring towns.
