Suspects are accused of deliberately creating panicked mood after attack, which left 33 people dead at Kunming train station

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Chinese police have arrested 45 people for "spreading rumours" online in the wake of Saturday's horrific knife attack at a Chinese train station.

The suspects have been arrested for "deliberately creating a panicked mood and disturbing social order, and will be dealt with according to the law and punished by public security", a branch of the country's public security bureau posted to its official microblog on Thursday, without providing further details.

The announcement underscores the sensitivity with which Chinese officials have handled the attack, which left at least 33 people dead and 144 wounded in the peaceful south-western city of Kunming. Witnesses said a handful of black-clad men and women hacked furiously at pedestrians with foot-long knives. State media reported that out of eight assailants, four were shot dead at the scene, and four have been captured.

China's official newswire Xinhua has called the attackers "separatists" from the ethnically riven north-west region Xinjiang. Although the region is frequently racked by violent clashes between its native Uighurs – a predominantly Muslim group numbering 8.4 million – and local police, such incidents beyond its borders are vanishingly rare.

Uighur groups abroad say the group has long chafed at Beijing's religious and cultural constraints. Beijing maintains that it grants Uighurs significant religious freedom, and blames the violence on interference from abroad.

At the National People's Congress, an important political conclave in Beijing, the region's top-ranked party official Zhang Chunxian blamed the internet – specifically VPNs, software that allows users to evade internet controls – for the surge in violence.

"90% of terrorism in Xinjiang comes from jumping the [firewall]," he told reporters after an open delegation meeting on Thursday afternoon. "Violence and terrorism continue to happen due to videos on the internet."

While Xinhua identified the attackers' ringleader as a man named Abdurehim Kurban, it has remained vague about their backgrounds and motivations. Officials have suggested that they wish to play down the attack's ethnic and religious dimensions, possibly to avoid fanning further unrest.

Rumours have proliferated to fill the information vacuum. Some conjecture about the attack – including photos of a black T-shirt ostensibly worn by one of the attackers – has been scrubbed from Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblog.

On Monday, the Communist party mouthpiece People's Daily posted a graphic warning against spreading seven specific rumours. One claimed that authorities had arrested more Uighur "terrorists" at a provincial airport; another recounted a slashing spree by "three attackers with ethnic accents" at a music conservatory in nearby Sichuan province.

Xinjiang officials at Thursday's delegation meeting barely touched on the attacks, focusing instead on the region's economic development, education system and agriculture.

In fleeting remarks about the violence, Xinjiang's ethnic Uighur governor Nur Bekr said: "What I especially want to emphasise is that violent terrorists cannot represent any ethnicity, and they can't represent any religion … the people of Xinjiang strongly condemn any kind of terrorist behaviour or terrorist attack."