Police have arrested four suspects in a deadly bomb attack on police auxiliary forces last week, a government spokeswoman said Wednesday, in the latest violence in China's restive Muslim far west. The four were part of a “violent gang of six people” responsible for the attack in the city of Aksu, said Hou Hanmin, government spokeswoman in Xinjiang, China's Central Asian buffer province where Aksu is located. In the attack last Thursday, the assailants drove a three-wheeled motorized vehicle into a crowd of people and then set off explosives. Eight people died, including two attackers and members of a civilian police auxiliary force, Hou said. She and a report by the state-run Xinhua News Agency did not ascribe a motive. But Xinjiang has been beset by ethnic conflict and a sometimes-violent separatist movement by Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group that sees Xinjiang as its homeland. Many Uighurs resent the Han Chinese majority as interlopers.
