Chinese police kill 3 'Xinjiang terrorists'

Beijing 

Police in northeastern China today killed three knife-wielding "terrorists" from Xinjiang, the mainly Muslim region in the far west, who attacked officers, local authorities said.

One other assailant described as a 28-year-old woman was injured in Liaoning, said a notice posted on a verified provincial government social media account.

Shenyang, the Liaoning capital where the incident happened, is almost 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles) from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which has seen sporadic violence in recent years blamed by authorities on Islamist terrorists.

The restive region is home to most of China's 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, who rights groups say face religious and cultural discrimination.

Fatal incidents outside Xinjiang, but linked to the violence in the region, are rare.

In one such incident, according to authorities, three people from a Xinjiang family crashed their car into crowds in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state, killing themselves and two visitors in October 2013, raising the spectre of spreading violence. 

In March 2014, 31 people were knifed to death by "Xinjiang separatists" in a mass stabbing at a train station in Kunming in the southwest, with four attackers killed. 

All four alleged attackers in Shenyang were described as "Xinjiang terrorists", with the woman, whose name was given phonetically as Amanguli Maititusong, identified as a Uighur.