Though many of the suspects in the attack were said to have been killed, one man surrendered to the police after being urged to do so by his grandfather, a member of the Communist Party, according to a report on Sunday in Tianshan, a news website run by the local government. A local senior police official, Memet Tohtinyaz, was killed while pursuing the suspects, Tianshan reported.

In a video posted online on Tuesday by Xinjiang television, the man said to have surrendered, Turghun Emet, who appeared to be in his 20s, said he had been told “we will do jihad,” presumably by the attackers’ leaders. It was impossible to determine whether the man was speaking freely.

“If we die when we do jihad, then we will go to heaven,” he said in Uighur in the video, to which Chinese subtitles had been added. “At that time, they gave me a knife. There was a knife in everyone’s hands — if you cut someone, kill someone, then you will be a martyr and go to heaven.”

Two other men, who were named the prime suspects in the attack, were also identified. Their black-and-white pictures were published on the Tianshan website, but the report did not say whether they were among the 28 suspects said to have been killed.

State news media released detailed articles about the mine attack several days after a series of coordinated terrorist strikes in and around Paris in November that killed 130 people; China said that it, too, had been a victim of terrorism carried out by religious extremists. A report in Tianshan said that the mine attack had killed 16 people, but interviews with local residents and relatives conducted in October by Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the United States government, and by The New York Times suggested that the number of deaths may have exceeded 50.