Tue, August 05, 2008
Attackers dressed as police ran down police officers with a truck, set off explosives and hacked the injured with machetes, eyewitnesses to a deadly assault in western China told AFP Tuesday.
Sixteen policemen in the Muslim northwestern city of Kashgar were killed in Monday's attack, according to state media.
"It was quite sickening to watch. My wife almost threw up and had to lie down afterward," said Wlodzislaw Duch, a Polish tourist who watched the gruesome scene unfold from his hotel room directly across the street.
Duch said two men who appeared to be dressed in police uniforms ploughed a truck through the group of officers, eventually striking the front door of a small hotel.
They then tossed small explosives at the stunned police, who numbered "at least a couple of dozen", several of them lying on the sidewalk injured or possibly dead, said Duch, a computer science professor.
Leaping out of the truck, the men then proceeded to hack at the officers on the ground with short swords resembling machetes.
When one of the attackers was eventually overpowered, a police officer grabbed the assailant's sword and engaged in a duel with the other attacker, Duch said.
"It was very strange. It was like two police officers having a sword fight," he said.
"There was blood all over the sidewalk."
The second attacker also was soon overpowered.
Duch's account was corroborated by another witness, a Han Chinese tourist from southern China's Guangdong province.
The man, who gave only his surname Feng, said the attackers wore uniforms resembling those of the People's Armed Police, an offshoot of the People's Liberation Army.
"They were very fierce. It was a very fierce attack," the man, aged 55, told AFP.
Feng said police reinforcements soon arrived at the scene, sealing off the area and removing the dead and wounded.
Xinhua news agency said 14 police were killed on the spot and two died from their wounds on the way to hospital. Another 16 were injured, it reported.
Police eventually brought in a street-cleaning vehicle, which scrubbed the blood from the sidewalks, Feng said, before he and other guests in rooms facing the road were ordered to move to the back of the hotel.
The small hotel that was struck by the truck had a tarpaulin stretched across its entrance, apparently to hide the damage from the collision
Nearby, a one-metre (three-foot) tall roadside pillar leaned to one side. Feng said it was struck by the attacker's lorry.
The attack was one of the deadliest reported assaults in China in years.
The two attackers, aged 28 and 33, were arrested immediately, Xinhua said.
(Agencies)
