Car bomb terror attack kills five in China’s western Xinjiang region, official media reports By Teddy Ng in South China Morning Post, Dec 29,2016

A “terror attack” struck a county in China’s restive region of Xinjiang on Wednesday, local authorities said, killing five people including the four attackers.
A car carrying the attackers crashed into the yard of the office building of the local Communist Party committee in Karakax county at 4.50pm, and a home-made explosive device was ignited, according to the news portal of the Xinjiang government.
Police shot and killed the four attackers, while one other person was killed and three others were injured, the report said.
Social order had been restored, it added, without identifying the attackers.
Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region that occupies one-sixth of China, has been the source of most violent attacks targeted at government and civilians.
But such attacks appear to be spilling out of region into the rest of the country in recent years.
In 2013, three ethnic Uygurs drove a jeep into pedestrians right in front of Tiananmen, a century-old symbol of Chinese rule, in Beijing killing five people including all three attackers, according to state media.
The following year, a knife attack broke out at railway station in Kunming, southwestern Yunnan province. Five knife-wielding assailants hacked 31 people to death and injured 141 others. Four of the attackers were shot dead at the scene.
Beijing has blamed Uygur separatists in the past for staging violent attacks, but overseas rights group have said the attacks were the results of repressive policies, which Beijing has firmly denied.
China blames the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for the unrest, but many experts doubt whether ETIM even exists as a cohesive militant group.
There have also been militants from Xinjiang joining the Islamic State’s fighting and training, according to Xinjiang officials.
Beijing said it had greatly raised the region’s living standards in the region, but also admitted the problem could not be solved by economic development alone.
The latest-hit Karakax county is part of the Hotan prefecture, which unlike Xinjiang’s north, has seen limited influx of ethnic Han people.
Ethnic Uygur comprise 97 per cent of Karakax’s total population, according to its government’s website. But four of the five members of the county’s party committee are Han officials.http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2057745/five-killed-terrorist-attack-chinas-western-xinjiang-region