Eight killed in attack on police in China's Muslim northwest

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BEIJING, Aug 10 (AFP): The death toll from a bombing and the aftermath in China's northwestern Xinjiang province Sunday rose to eight, with four injured, state media said.

Seven attackers and one security guard died in the attack in which the bombers drove a tricycle laden with explosives into the yard of a police station in the remote city of Kuqa, Xinhua news agency said.

Explosions shook the remote city of Kuqa while it was still dark Sunday morning, with the assailants targetting the police station and a government office, Xinhua news agency reported.

The violence was the latest to rock the region of Xinjiang, a vast area in China's northwest that borders central Asia, where Islamic separatists have vowed to stage attacks in an effort to wreck the Beijing Olympics.

In one of the deadliest attacks in China in years, two alleged Muslim militants using explosives and knifes to attack policemen out jogging in the Xinjiang town of Kashgar on August 4, left 16 dead and 16 wounded.

China blamed that attack, which occurred four days before the start of the Games, on Islamic militant Uighur separatists.

Xinjiang has about 8.3 million ethnic Muslim Uighurs, many of whom express anger at what they say has been decades of repressive Communist Chinese rule.

Two short-lived East Turkestan republics emerged in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s, when Chinese central government control was weakened by civil war and Japanese invasion.

China has repeatedly accused Uighur militants of the banned East Turkestan Islamic Movement of plotting attacks on the Olympics and has implemented sweeping security in Xinjiang and in Beijing in the lead-up the Games.