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.
The tense political crisis Rivers State boiled over today as Senator Magnus Abe, the Senator representing Rivers South East zone and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream) was shot twice in the chest and leg with a rubber bullet by some men of the River State Police command, which knocked him off his feet and has rendered him speechless and in severe shock.
The party also reported the killing of five youngsters by the police at the rally of the party at the College of Arts and Science in Port Harcourt, along with the arrest of Ike Chinwo, a member of the Federal House of Representatives representing Obio-Akpor Federal Constituency.
