The attackers drove a car into the station and set off explosives on Saturday morning, the local government said on its website.

Three police suffered minor injuries but no civilians were hurt, it added.

The Chinese authorities blame Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang for an increasing number of attacks in the province.

"On the morning of 21 June, a group of thugs drove a car into a police building in Yecheng County, Kashgar province and detonated explosives," the local government website said.

"Police shot dead the 13 attackers," it reported. It provided no further details.

Verifying reports from the Xinjiang region is difficult because access for journalists is restricted and the flow of information is tightly controlled.

The authorities have tightened security in Xinjiang in recent months.

On Monday, China executed 13 people in Xinjiang for what it called "terrorist attacks".

The authorities also sentenced three men - believed to Uighurs - over a fatal car crash in Beijing last year.

Five people were killed when a car ploughed into a crowd in Beijing's Tiananmen Square last October. Dozens of others were injured.

Attacks blamed by Beijing on Uighur separatists include deadly bomb and knife attacks on railway stations in Urumqi in Xinjiang, and Kunming in south-west China.

Uighur leaders deny that they are co-ordinating a terrorist campaign.

Activists have accused Beijing of exaggerating the threat from Uighur separatists to justify a crackdown on the Uighurs' religious and cultural freedoms.

Pakistan’s security forces said Monday they have relaunched a military operation at Karachi airport as gunfire resumed several hours after they announced the end of a militant siege that left 24 dead.

“We have relaunched the operation and called in additional troops,” said Sibtain Rizvi, spokesman for the Rangers paramilitary force, adding that one police officer had been injured in the firing.

On Sunday night, heavily armed militants launched an assault on Pakistan’s busiest airport in the southern city of Karachi, leaving at least 24 dead including 10 militants in a six-hour siege that the army quelled at dawn today. (See pics)

Explosions and gunfire rang out as the attackers, equipped with suicide vests, grenades and rocket launchers, battled security forces in one of the most brazen attacks in years in Pakistan’s biggest city.

Authorities said all 10 militants had been killed and that the bodies of 14 victims, including security personnel and four airport workers, had been identified at the city’s main hospital.

“Update: Area cleared. No damage to aircraft, fire visible in pics was not plane but a building, now extinguished. All vital assets intact,” military spokesman Major General Asim Bajwa said in a tweet.

The attack will raise fresh concerns about Pakistan’s shaky security situation, and questions about how militants were able to penetrate Jinnah International Airport, which serves one of the world’s biggest cities.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the assault, but it came as talks between Pakistan and the Taliban, which began earlier this year, hit an impasse.

Officials said the gunmen entered from two sides of the airport at around 11:00 pm on Sunday — the terminal used for the hajj pilgrimage, and an engineering section close to an old terminal that is no longer in use.

NDTV

Twenty-three persons are reported to have died after heavily armed gunmen attacked Pakistan’s international airport, in Karachi.

According to foreign media, the siege is reported to be over.

Clashes at Pakistan’s largest and busiest airport left more than 20 people dead after militants armed with grenades stormed into a cargo area Sunday.

Violence erupted at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi around 11:30 p.m. Sunday and raged on for more than five hours as security forces fought off attackers, leaving some passengers trapped inside the airport.

Officials at Jinnah Hospital in Karachi said the dead included eight members of airport security forces, two Pakistan International Airlines employees and one ranger.

Ten militants were also killed in the clashes, said Niaz Abbasi, home secretary of Sindh province. The attack ended Monday morning, and authorities were securing the area, Abbasi said.

It was not immediately clear who the militants were or why they staged the assault.

Clashes broke out after attackers armed with grenades stormed the airport through three entrances, said Ahmad Chinoy, director-general of the citizen’s police liaison committee.

One militant blew himself up in front of an armored car, leaving some people inside the vehicle critically injured, Chinoy said.

A plume of smoke rose over the airport as fires raged in at least two locations. Dozens of ambulances were lined up as police and military troops swarmed the area.

A cargo plane was damaged and set ablaze in the fighting, Chinoy said. The airport’s cargo area is about a kilometer (0.62 miles) away from the area where commercial planes take off.

Foreign Media