Three people are dead and 79 more are recovering from injuries after a bomb blast at a train station in China’s restive Northwest, where Islamist separatists want their own state.  The blast coincided with President Xi Jinping’s visit to the area.

Assailants with knives attacked people and set off the explosive at south exit of the railway station of Urumqi, the capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Police quickly locked down the station, but had it reopened only two hours later, with heavily armed cops everywhere. 

Xi promised the government would take the fight to the separatists, using “decisive methods”.  The attack on civilians and the use of explosives is raising concerns.

"Violence in Xinjiang has previously tended to target security personnel and officials, often carried out with knives or farm tools,” said Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, who specializes in Uighur history and issues.  “A bomb attack targeting civilians, if that is what this is, would mark an alarming deviation from previous patterns of Uighur political violence.”

Last year, three Uighurs rammed a vehicle into crowds in a suicide attack near the Forbidden City gate in the heart of Beijing, killing themselves and two tourists.  In March, five knife-wielding men and women believed to be Uighurs slashed at crowds indiscriminately at a railway station in southwestern China, killing 29 people.