At least 31 people have been killed and more than 90 injured after two vehicles ploughed into a market and explosives were thrown in China’s restive Xinjiang region ( East Turkistan ), the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Two off-road vehicles drove into a crowd in the regional capital Urumqi on Thursday, with one of them exploding, Xinhua said, in what state-run media called the latest “serious terrorist incident” to hit Xinjiang, home to mostly Muslim Uyghurs.

The owner of a small business told Xinhua he had heard a dozen big bangs, reported the AFP news agency

Pictures posted on Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, purported to show victims lying in a tree-lined street. Flames rose in the background, while other images showed smoke billowing over market stalls behind a police roadblock.

Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Nanning, said the explosion appears to have been “very large”.

He said information flow from Xinjiang is tightly controlled by the government,making it hard to establish the scale of the attack.

China has blamed a chain of knife and bomb attacks in recent months on separatists from East Turkistan ( so-called Xinjiang ).

East Turkistan ( so-called Xinjiang ) has been plagued by violence for years, but rights activists and exile groups say the government’s own heavy-handed policies in the region have sowed the seeds of unrest.

Source : Aljazeera