And, In China, knife attack leaves 28 dead, scores injured at train station

Assailants wielding large knives in the capital of Yunnan province kill at least 28 and injure more than 113. Authorities blame separatists from Xinjiang, 1,500 miles away.

At least 28 people died and more than 113 were injured Saturday when a group of assailants wielding large knives stormed into a railway station in southern China and apparently attacked people at random, state-run media reported.

President Xi Jinping vowed swift action to punish those responsible for the bloody attack and “suppress terrorists’ rampant momentum,” the official New China News Agency reported. The agency said separatists from the far western region of Xinjiang were behind the highly unusual and terrifying attack in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.

It was not immediately clear why Yunnan would be targeted or separatists responsible. Xinjiang, home to a Muslim ethnic minority called Uighurs, has witnessed a number of violent clashes in recent years, including a riot in July 2009 that left nearly 200 dead and a series of lethal clashes at police stations involving knives and homemade firebombs. But Kunming is about 1,500 miles from Xinjiang’s capital.

Authorities, though, have been worried about unrest spreading beyond Xinjiang, particularly since October, when a jeep plowed through a crowd in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and caught fire.

It was not clear how many attackers were involved in the incident Saturday in Kunming. In addition to the 28 victims of the attack, five assailants were killed, the news agency said, though others apparently remained at large as of Sunday morning.

The Kunming station erupted into bloody pandemonium about 9:30 p.m. The bloody incident comes just before two high-profile gatherings are to be held in Beijing this week, the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Kunming is about 1,300 miles southwest of the capital.

Two senior officials, domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu and the minister of public security, Guo Shengkun, were dispatched to Yunnan.

Another person claiming to be a witness posted an account online saying that sometime after 9:24 p.m. he was waiting at the ticket counter when chaos erupted. He wrote that he saw a man in a yellow jacket and woman in black clothing carrying out the attack, and that one had a knife about 2 feet long.

It took authorities until nearly 1 a.m. to subdue all of the attackers.

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