KASHGAR -- At least 16 policemen in China's Muslim-majority northwest were killed Monday in a suspected terrorist attack, state media said, raising security fears four days before the Beijing Olympics.
In one of the deadliest reported assaults in China in years, a lorry was aimed at 70 police officers jogging near their barracks in Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang region close to Central Asia, the Xinhua news agency said.
After the lorry hit a roadside pole, one of the two attackers got out and threw home-made explosives at the exercising police officers, the agency reported.
It said 14 police were killed on the spot and two died from their wounds on the way to hospital. Another 16 were injured.
The two attackers, aged 28 and 33, were arrested immediately, according to the news agency, which identified the men as members of the Muslim ethnic Uighur group.
"We were awakened... by two very loud bangs," said Siegfried Maurer, a German who was staying with his family at the Barony Hotel near where the attack occurred in the northwest of the city.
Police in Kashgar, which is close to the Tajikistan border and around 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from Beijing, immediately imposed a lockdown in the surrounding areas, Maurer said.
"There were about 20 police on our floor alone. They came into our rooms and checked our cameras to see if we had taken any pictures of the incident," he said, adding he was not allowed to leave for four hours.
The incident, a suspected terrorist attack, according to Xinhua, cast a pall over the Olympic countdown, after government warnings that members of Xinjiang's Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, were planning to wreck the Games.
Dilxat Raxit, a Sweden-based spokesman for the World Uighur Congress, said anger was rising among Uighurs about a pre-Olympic crackdown involving numerous arrests, but he could not confirm if Uighurs carried out the attack.
"The police and soldiers just arrest them without any rules," he told AFP.
Beijing Olympic organizers said it did not know yet if there was a direct connection to the showpiece sporting event, which begins on Friday.
But China has said repeatedly that a major terrorist threat emanates from Xinjiang and that militants from there were planning to stage attacks on the Games.
They say the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a UN-listed terrorist group, is the main concern there.
Xinjiang has about 8.3 million Uighurs, and many are unhappy with what they say has been decades of repressive Communist Chinese rule. Some in Xinjiang still cling to hopes of independence and establishing "East Turkestan."
Two short-lived East Turkestan republics emerged in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when central government control in China was weakened by civil war and Japanese invasion.
In line with the flow of information in China surrounding security issues, reports were released only through official channels, while local authorities denied any knowledge of the event.
"Everything has returned to normal," an official with the Kashgar People's Armed Police said by telephone. He declined any other comment.
Timothy O'Rourke, an American, arrived at the scene of the attack about five hours afterwards, when everything had been cleared up, but broken windows were evidence of the morning violence.
"It looks like they are trying to pretend it didn't happen. There is water all over the street, it looks like they have hosed it down," he told AFP by telephone.
China's state media carries only sporadic reports about violence in Xinjiang, making it difficult to determine the extent of the terrorist threat in the region.
But it was thought to be one of the deadliest such attacks ever reported in Xinjiang.
"If 16 people died, I would think that this is the highest casualty ever reported for an incident," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch and an expert on Xinjiang.
