Authorities said they were treating a brazen attack that left 16 police officers dead and 16 others injured yesterday as a terrorist strike.
The two men arrested after the attack were members of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority, which has long chafed under Beijing's control of northwestern China.
The incident followed the release of a video last month in which a group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party threatened attacks during the Olympic Games, which open in Beijing on Friday.
Although specialists believed the group's claims were inflated, it has asserted responsibility for recent bombings around China.
The group has said it wants to draw attention to its demands to establish an independent state and end Chinese repression of Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language and have made this area 2,000 miles west of Beijing their home for centuries.
In Beijing, an Olympic spokesman said yesterday that the Chinese government has taken every precaution to try to prevent an attack at the Games. Details of the attack remained unclear yesterday and into early this morning.
Local police refused to comment at the scene and official reports in state-run media differed throughout the day.
According to the latest account in the New China News Service, an assailant rammed a dump truck into a crowd of 70 border police officers around 8 a.m. yesterday as they were jogging past the Yiquan Hotel, near their barracks, in a regular morning exercise.
After the truck slammed into an electrical pole, the agency said, the assailant leapt out and attempted to throw a homemade explosive device at wounded police. The device detonated early, the agency said, blowing off one of the assailant's arms.
A second assailant threw an explosive device near the gate of the police station, a few hundred yards down the street from the hotel. It was unclear whether the second man was in the truck. Both men, ages 28 and 33, were arrested at the scene, police said. Their names were not released.
Police said they found 10 homemade explosives, a homemade handgun and four knives in the vehicle, the news agency reported.
The Chinese government has said a violent Uighur separatist group that calls itself the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is the greatest threat to security at the Olympic Games. Some terrorism specialists suggest that although China routinely blames the group and uses its existence to carry out oppressive policies against all Uighurs, the separatist movement is actually divided up into a number of groups with similar goals.
Xinjiang officials say so far this year they have arrested 82 and broken up five terrorist cells planning attacks related to the Games.
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