BEIJING: Sixteen people were killed in a clash in China's Xinjiang region, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, reports said Monday, less than two months after a fiery attack in Tiananmen Square.

Police attempting to detain criminal suspects in Shufu county near the Silk Road city of Kashgar, deep in far western China, were attacked by several “thugs” armed with explosive devices and knives, reported the tianshannet news portal, which is run by the Xinjiang government.

Two police officers were killed and 14 of the “thugs” shot dead on Sunday, it said, adding that two criminal suspects were detained.

The incident comes less than two months after an attack in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state, when according to police, three Xinjiang Uighurs ploughed into crowds of tourists, killing two people and injuring 40, before crashing outside the Forbidden City and setting their vehicle ablaze.

The three attackers, named by authorities as Usmen Hasan, his wife and his mother, all died.

Beijing described the assault, the first blamed on Uighurs outside Xinjiang, as “terrorism” and said separatists backed by the militant East Turkestan Islamic Movement were responsible.

But outside experts pointed to the unsophisticated nature of the attack and the lack of an established Islamist extremist foothold in China.

Xinjiang, a vast area bordering Pakistan and Central Asia beyond the furthest reaches of the Great Wall, has followed Islam for centuries.

For years it has seen sporadic unrest by Uighurs which rights groups say is driven by cultural oppression, intrusive security measures and immigration by China's Han majority, but Beijing attributes to religious extremists, terrorism and separatism.

In the worst outbreak of sectarian violence in recent years, around 200 people died and more than 1,600 were injured and hundreds arrested in riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009.

A total of 11 people, nine attackers and two auxiliary police officers, were killed in an attack on a police station in Serikbuya township near Kashgar last month, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Another incident in June in the Turpan area left 35 people dead, and 139 people have been arrested in recent months for spreading jihadist ideology.

Information in the area is tightly controlled and difficult to independently verify.

In August, a Chinese policeman was killed in an incident in Yilkiqi described by state media as an “anti-terrorism” operation, but overseas media said 22 Uighurs were shot dead in the confrontation.

Authorities in Kashgar were not immediately available for comment on the latest incident when contacted by AFP on Monday.

More than 190 “terrorist” attacks were logged in Xinjiang last year, rising “by a significant margin” from 2011, state media reported last month.

Most of the attackers were in their early 30s or younger and increasingly act in small groups or individually as “a lone wolf”, they added.

At a meeting last week, top Turpan officials said violent “terrorists”remained active in the area despite the authorities' “strike hard with high npressure” campaign, according to a statement posted on a government site.

They ordered local officials to chart a “relationship tree” of links between students in Turpan and those overseas, it said.

China arrested more than 1,000 people for “endangering state security”, a charge commonly brought against ethnic minorities, in 2012, up nearly 20 per cent from the previous year, the US-based Dui Hua Foundation said last month citing official figures.

More than 75 per cent of trials for suspects accused of the crime took place in Xinjiang, it added.

The offence replaced that of “counter-revolution” in the 1990s, and is primarily aimed at suppressing political dissent.

It applies to “splittism”, or attempts to advocate independence for regions of China, as well as actions including espionage.