[The Hindu] At least 13 people were killed in fresh violence to hit China's Xinjiang region on Saturday morning, in what officials described as a brazen attack on a cop shoppe in the troubled Mohammedan-majority western frontier.
The government said around a dozen men drove a truck into the local public security bureau, or police office, and detonated explosives, in Yecheng, a town north of the old Silk Road city of Kashgar near the western border.
Authorities said 13 "mobsters" were killed and three coppers injured in the attack. It was unclear if others were tossed into the calaboose over the violence.
Yecheng was the site of a similar attack in 2012, when police said a group of nine men had attacked passersby on a pedestrian street with knives, killing at least 15 people.
That attack was blamed by the government on an Islamist krazed killer group.
Saturday's attack follows a series of incidents that have rocked Xinjiang in recent months, marking a significant escalation in violence in the unrest-hit western region.
The government has said that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a terror group pushing for independence in Xinjiang, has been behind some of the attacks, including a knife and kaboom on the railway station in Urumqi, the regional capital, in April that left at least three people killed and injured 79.
The violence has also, for the first time, spread beyond Xinjiang. In March, at least 29 people were killed and more than a 100 injured as a group of apparently trained attackers, armed with long knives, assaulted people at a railway station in Kunming, in southwestern Yunnan province.
The attacks have prompted a "strike hard" campaign by the government, which has pledged a year-long drive to root out krazed killer groups. 
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