BEIJING, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- Courts in China's ethnically-tense Xinjiang-Uighur region sentenced four people to death after finding them guilty of masterminding the July attacks there.
China's Xinhua news agency, quoting a local Web site, reported Thursday the four were involved in two deadly terrorist attacks in July in the northwest region's town of Hotan and Kashgar and the courts in those cities found them guilty of masterminding and engaging in terrorist organizations, illegally making explosives, murder and arson.
Two other accused were each sentenced to 19 years in jail.
The report said in the first attack, July 18 in Hotan, several rioters attacked a police station, killing four people and injuring four more. It said attacks in Kashgar, July 30 and 31, left 13 more people dead and 44 more injured.
A group calling itself Turkistan Islamic Party claimed this month in an online video -- reported by the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence monitoring group -- that the violence was its revenge against China's repression of the area's ethnic Uighurs.
In similar acts of ethnic violence in July 2009, about 200 people died in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang-Uighur, which is close to Pakistan and several central and west Asian countries. Since then, China has increased its government surveillance and police actions, causing more resentment among the Uighurs.
The region is home to Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs who resent being ruled by Han Chinese.
China's official media had previously quoted authorities as blaming the Kashgar violence on Islamic extremists trained in Pakistan, a close ally of China.
