Chinese police have killed three knife-wielding "terrorists" on Monday in northeastern China, after the three suspects attempted to attack the police. The three suspects were from Xinjiang, which is home to the vast majority of China's Muslim population.
The incident happened in Shenyang, the Liaoning capital, which is almost 3,000 kilometers away from Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. The area has bared witness to sporadic violence in recent years, in incidents that Chinese authorities blame on Islamist terrorists among the Muslim population, according to the Guardian.
The region is home to about 10 million Uighurs, one of China's prominent minorities. The Turkic-speaking group has been subject to a number of issues, many of them involving cultural and religious discrimination by the Chinese government, reports Channel News Asia.
The alleged treatment of the Muslim minority has triggered a significant amount of unrest in other countries, such as Turkey. A number of protests against China's treatment of the Uighurs, as covered previously by HNGN, have been conducted by the Turks, who consider the Uighurs as a close Muslim group who share the same cultural and religious background.
A number of Uighurs have also attempted to flee China by sea, due to discrimination that they have experienced in the mainland. Recently, human rights groups were aghast when Thailand decided to deport more than 100 Uighurs back to China, as reported by HNGN.
Although attacks by extremists are quite rare outside Xinjiang, the numerous instances when attacks did happen were very deadly, such as the fatal incident of a Xinjiang family crashing their car in the middle of a crowd in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of China.
