Terror attacks kill 31 in China's tense Xinjiang region

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.