Police in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang have shot dead three “knife-wielding” men, state media said, calling them Xinjiang terrorists.<\/p>\n
A woman was also injured in the raid which took place on Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n
Xinjiang province, home to a significant Muslim Uighur population, has seen several clashes and public attacks in recent years, which police have attributed to terrorists.<\/p>\n
Monday’s incident was one of the few such clashes outside of Xinjiang.<\/p>\n
Several state media outlets quoted a statement posted on Monday night on micro-blogging site Weibo. The account is owned by the government of Liaoning province, whose capital is Shenyang.<\/p>\n
The statement appeared to have been taken down by Tuesday morning. It remains unclear why it was removed, but China regularly censors online content deemed to be sensitive.<\/p>\n
‘Shouting slogans’<\/strong><\/p>\n The statement, as reproduced in Chinese media, said that police caught 16 “terrorism suspects” in a raid in Shenyang.<\/p>\n During the raid, officers entered a rented apartment where they “discovered Xinjiang terrorist suspects” and were attacked by four people “wearing headgear, holding long knives, and shouting ‘holy war’ slogans,” the statement said.<\/p>\n Police then retreated and called for back-up. More than 200 officers, including an anti-terrorist unit, evacuated nearby residents and surrounded the building. A cherry picker was used to reach the seventh-floor apartment.<\/p>\n Pictures of the raid posted on a Weibo account owned by state broadcaster CCTV showed armed, uniformed men stationed on a rooftop and in a cherry picker cabin.<\/p>\n Police said they also took into custody a 28-year-old Uighur woman and three children.<\/p>\n China has seen frequent reports of deadly clashes with police and public attacks in Xinjiang attributed to terrorism, but few incidents have been reported outside of the restive region.<\/p>\n In March 2014 a stabbing spree in Kunming city which killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.<\/p>\n Rights groups have accused China of persecution and torture of the Uighur minority, but China has rejected such claims.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Police in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang have shot dead three “knife-wielding” men, state media said, calling them Xinjiang terrorists. A woman was also injured in the raid which took place on Monday afternoon. Xinjiang province, home to a significant Muslim Uighur population, has seen several clashes and public attacks in recent years, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":134260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-134259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/134260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}