HONG KONG — A suicide bomber in the volatile Chinese region of Xinjiang killed as many as eight people on Friday when he grabbed a police officer and set off an explosive device attached to his body, according to a report by Radio Free Asia.

The young man, a member of the Uighur ethnic group, set off the device in Hotan Prefecture, an impoverished part of Xinjiang near the border with India and Pakistan, the report said. In addition to the deaths, at least seven people remained hospitalized, Radio Free Asia, a news service funded by the United States government, reported on Monday, citing interviews with a hospital worker and a shopkeeper.

The account could not be independently confirmed, and the Chinese state news media had yet to report on the attack.

In recent years, Xinjiang, in China’s far west, has been the scene of many bloody clashes between Uighurs, a Turkic group that makes up about 40 percent of the region’s population, and the ethnic Han who make up China’s majority. Violence between Uighurs and Han in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in July 2009 killed nearly 200 people.