A group of knife-wielding assailants attacked civilians on Friday morning on a street in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province. At least one is killed in the attack. Photo: sina.com

 
Four people were stabbed to death by a suspect who was trying to flee after stabbing his fellow vendor to death in a vegetable market in Changsha, Hunan Province on Friday morning, according to the Changsha Police.

Police said the two vendors got into a fight over their stall at around 10:15am, and one of them stabbed the other to death. As he attempted to flee, the suspect stabbed two passersby to death, and injured another two on the street. The two injured died after being sent to a nearby hospital for emergency treatment.

The suspect was shot dead by police at the scene, according to the official microblog of Changsha police.

The two vendors, named Hebir Turdi and Memet Abla, who ran a business in Changsha, were not local, Xinhua News Agency reported. According to Changsha Evening News, Turdi, the suspect was from Moyu county, southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.   

"The two are from Xinjiang, and worked with several fellow villagers in a stall that sells naan, a bread-like traditional Xinjiang food," a grocery store owner surnamed Xiao told the Global Times.

"They didn't speak Putonghua. I knew them because they shop at my store sometimes," Xiao said.

 The incident has touched the nerve of the public just two weeks after a brutal terror attack carried out by Xinjiang separatist forces left 29 innocent people dead and more than 143 injured in Kunming, Yunnan Province.

Although many had called on people to stay calm before the authoritative details of the incident were disclosed, in the hours after news of the attack surfaced online, some could not help fearing it might be another organized attack aimed at terrifying the public by mass killing.

Pan Zhiping, a researcher with the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, admitted that the image of Uyghurs has been tainted by reports about some of them stealing from people, not to mention the terrorist attack in Kunming recently.

"But the odds of terrorist and violent attacks are still rare, so we call on people to stay calm," Pan told the Global Times. He added that there were many good Uyghur Samaritans, such as the young man from Xinjiang who donated blood soon after the Kunming terror attack, and many of them are appealing to fellow citizens to not discriminate against Uyghurs.

Uyghur people are often discriminated against by Han people in other cities, said Pan. "Some officials from Xinjiang were not permitted to check in to hotels in Beijing during the Two Sessions this year.