Uygur Autonomous Regional Political and Legislative Affairs Committee said Thursday that the situation in Urumqi has been improving.

The number of stabbings has decreased in the past few days. Out of the 40 latest reported stabbing cases on Tuesday, only 20 were confirmed, and all of the 20 took place before that day, the official surnamed Liu, said in an exclusive interview with the Global Times.

The first attack occurred August 17 and five others followed over two days from August 22 to August 23, the official said, adding high-ranking officials in Xinjiang immediately tried to stem further attacks even though the nature of the attack was unclear.

According to a medical document released by Liu, the first documented attack was against a woman surnamed Zhang who was riding bus No. 502. She was treated at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xinjiang Medical University.

Police started speculating that the attacks appeared were organized after the 12th syringe attack, Liu said.

The official told Global Times that by August 30, no one was arrested for any attack and more people have since been stabbed.

Out of fear that forceful warnings would spread panic, the government opted to send text messages to people and beef up security.

Efforts by the authorities to prevent the attacks in Urumqi have helped to return life to some level of normalcy in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region as of Thursday.

The official was also concerned about the potential for the attacks to spread outside of the city.

Reports that some were using dirty needles to poke people in Korla and Shihezi, an almost entirely Han city, strained people's nerves, he said.

In nearby Changji, about 35 kilometers northwest of Urumqi, workers at the No. 1 Secondary School chased three suspects Monday they believed attacked people with needles outside the school gate.

Some 200 angry passers-by rounded up suspects before police officers came.

Three people were suspected of stabbing people but one managed to escape. One of the suspects was a Uygur man in his 20s.

Suspects reportedly stabbed 18 people and eight of them were confirmed to have been attacked with needles, the Changji prefecture police authorities told the Global Times.

In an apparent move to quell deadly protests over the stabbings, the Urumqi government has sent nearly 20,000 officials to 502 communities.

While authorities are working hard to stop the syringe stabbings in Urumqi, they are encountering difficulties tracking down evidence and finding suspects, Liu said. He said although the stabbings are "soft violence", the intention is to incite public fear and trigger ethnic resentment.

"There are two major difficulties in tracking down suspects. One is, in the first few days, more people went to the hospital instead of calling for the police, missing the best opportunity to catch suspects," Liu said.

"The second is that there were hardly any proof at the site of attacks as any needle-shaped tool could be used as weapon and they got lost easily."

Source: www.truexinjiang.com