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that Chinese authorities have blamed on radical separatists from the country's Muslim Uighur minority. The Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack was "a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature."
• The two vehicles crashed through barriers at 7:50 a.m., drove right into the crowds while setting off explosives, the statement said.
• The SUVs 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.
• It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack. Recent violence has been blamed on extremists seeking to overthrow Chinese rule in the region, which is home to the native Turkic-speaking Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurs) but has seen large inflows from China's ethnic Han majority in recent decades.
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• BEIJING (AP) -- A timeline of recent violent incidents linked to tensions in China's far northwestern region of Xinjiang between its native Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group and China's majority Han. China tightly controls information about such incidents, and it's not always clear what transpired or the exact number of victims and attackers killed.
• Aug. 4, 2008: Two Uighur men steal a dump truck and drive it into a group of policemen in the far western city of Kashgar, killing 16 people. The attack comes just days ahead of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, fulfilling expectations that extremists would attempt to disrupt the games.
• July 5-7, 2009: Violence breaks out between police and protesting Uighurs in central Urumqi, then spreads through much of the city. A total of 197 people are killed, most of them Han Chinese, in the worst bloodshed in Xinjiang in decades.
• July 18, 2011: A group of young Uighur men attack government offices and a police station outside the city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang, killing two officers and two hostages. Of the 18 attackers, 14 are shot dead.
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