Tiananmen Square, Beijing. (Wikimedia)

According to the Beijing police's microblog on Sina Weibo, there was gasoline, a pair of knives, steel sticks, "as well as a flag with extremist religious content" in the wreckage of the jeep.

The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau has announced that five suspects in China's Xinjiang Uigyur Autonomous Region, an area rife with Uyghur-Han ethnic tensions, have been detained for their connection to the alleged terrorist attack.

The official report released by Xinhua News Agency, a major Chinese state media outlet, identified the driver of the Xinjiang-registered vehicle as Usman Hasan, and the two other passengers as his wife and mother-in-law.

Police said that Hasan, his wife, and mother-in-law ignited the gasoline themselves while inside the SUV, killing themselves.

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State media also reports that the suspected persons arrested in Xinjiang "schemed to carry out the violent terrorist act" together with Hasan, and that the state police found flags containing the word "jihad" and long swords in the suspects' possession at the time of arrest.

Xinjiang has a history of reactionary Uyghur separatism in the face of state-enforced economic expansion, increased Han presence in the region and the resulting marginalization of the Uyghur ethnicity.

The Uyghur have been calling for the independent rule of Xinjiang as East Turkestan for quite some time, so tensions between the Muslim Uyghur and Han Chinese have a history of turning extremely violent - ethnic riots, police crackdowns, plane hijackings.

Still, there are doubts surrounding the validity of the Chinese state media's reports.

"The Chinese government will not hesitate to concoct a version of the incident in Beijing, so as to further impose repressive measures on the Uyghur people," declared World Uyghur Congress president Rebiya Kadeer on Tuesday, in a statement made from Washington. "Today, I fear for the future of East Turkestan and the Uighur people more than I ever have."

Meanwhile, Uyghur groups warn the press and the public not to regard Uyghur extremists as representative of the majority population in the region: 

"Uyghur people are, just like the Tibetans, fed up with the Chinese government's brutal rule in their homeland. Therefore some people unfortunately take matters into their own hands out of desperation and decide to express their resistance to Chinese rule by violent means," said Alim Seytoff, spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress.

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