HOWZAT

He said that his parents run a shop that had not been damaged but many neighbours' properties had been. "We don’t feel safe. We have to protect ourselves."

Several times the crowd were halted by police cordons blocking roads to sensitive government buildings. As they marched they chanted in unison: "Stand up! Stand up!", "Strength comes from unity", "Protect Xinjiang!" and "We Han must unite together".

The police stood firm. Those in the second line of the cordon were armed with crossbows, although it was not clear what the bows were designed to fire. One man told The Times: "There is an order not to use firearms."

Earlier, about 300 Uighurs confronted riot police to demand the release of family members they said had been arbitrarily arrested in the crackdown after the weekend's bloodshed. Offiicials say 1,434 people have been arrested.

One woman, Maliya, said: “My husband was taken away yesterday by police. They didn't say why. They just took him away." Another girl described how her teenage brother was grabbed from his bed in a midnight police raid.

Abdul Ali, a Uighur man in his twenties who had taken off his shirt, held up his clenched fist. "They've been arresting us for no reason and it's time for us to fight back." He said three of his brothers as well as a sister had been among the suspects taken into police custody for questioning over the riots. Local residents complained that police were making indiscriminate sweeps of Uighur areas.

Scuffles and fights broke out when the Uighurs advanced on the police carrying clubs, just as journalists were being escorted to the area to see the damage inflicted on the city in the rampage by Uighurs protesting against Beijing rule at the weekend.

The police backed away, apparently to prevent an escalation of violence, and the crowd gradually dispersed.

Hours earlier, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party boss of Xinjiang, said that the unrest had been quelled. However, he warned that "this struggle is far from over".

The streets of Urumqi, which is nearer Tehran than Beijing, were almost deserted except for the mobs of Han Chinese. At one point the tensions spilled over. On a street near the city’s main People’s Square, paramilitary police in bulletproof vests had forced two Uighurs face down on the ground, their hands behind their necks.

Angry crowds of Han men shouted and tried to reach them. The police bundled them into a small van. Several Han then attacked the bus with their sticks, trying to beat the two men with their staves through the open windows. They were pulled back by the police who drove the two Uighur men to safety.

The Government has declared a three-day holiday since the riot on Sunday, the deadliest single day of social violence in China since the 1989 crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Some Xinjiang newspapers carried graphic pictures of the violence, including corpses, at least one of which showed a woman whose throat had been slashed. Those reports may have fomented the anger in the volatile region of about 20 million people, about half of them Muslim Uighurs.

Despite the heightened security, the unrest appeared to be spreading. Police dispersed about 200 people at the Id Kah mosque in the Silk Road city of Kashgar on Monday night.

Chinese officials have already blamed the unrest on separatist groups abroad, which it says want to create an independent homeland of East Turkestan for the Uighurs. Ms Kadeer, the exiled Uighur businesswoman and activist blamed for the violence, denied having anything to do with it. She said: "These accusations are completely false."

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