China says 31 people killed, more than 90 injured in Xinjiang market attack

BEIJING, China – China’s state-run news agency says 31 people have been killed and more than 90 injured in an early morning attack on a busy street market in the capital of the country’s volatile northwestern region of Xinjiang.

The death toll makes Thursday’s attack the bloodiest in a series of violent incidents blamed on radical separatist Muslims.

The official Xinhua News Agency says the assailants plowed through crowds of shoppers in off-road vehicles and threw explosives out the window before crashing head-on in the attack in the city of Urumqi. It says one of the vehicles then exploded and quotes an eyewitness as saying there were up to a dozen blasts in all.

Urumqi was the scene of a railway station bomb attack late last month that killed three people, including two attackers, and injured 79.