BEIJING  Nine people have been executed for taking part in ethnic rioting that convulsed a western regional capital in July and left nearly 200 people dead, a state news agency reported Monday.

The report by the China News Service did not give any further details of the executions, except to say that the cases had all been reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court, a legally mandated step in death penalty cases in China. The report, which was removed from the Internet early Tuesday, did not say when the executions occurred.

The ethnicity of those executed was unclear. The report simply called them “criminals.” The rioting that broke out in the regional capital, Urumqi, on July 5 was largely carried out by Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who mostly follow Sunni Islam and are the biggest ethnic group in the vast Central Asian border region of Xinjiang.

Many Uighurs resent what they call discrimination by Han, the dominant ethnic group in China; the Chinese government says that 197 people were killed and 1,600 people injured on July 5, most of them Han.