Chinese officials were quick to blame the attack on Muslim separatists from the ethnic Uighur population native to Xinjiang. The Chinese have accused the Uighurs of plotting a number of terrorist attacks in the months leading up to the Olympics, arresting dozens of suspected militants in the process.
Since 2001 China has been claiming that there are ties between Uighur militants in Xinjiang and al-Qaeda. The problem is that there is very little independent evidence that the Muslim Uighurs have any ties to al-Qaeda, nor that there is an active separatist movement that will use violence to achieve its goals. There have been only a handful of small-scale terrorist-style acts that can be traced to Uighur separatists in the past 20 years.
The Uighurs, meanwhile, claim that China is attempting to do in Xinjiang what they are accused of doing in Tibet (Xinjiang's neighbor to the south) - engaging in a systematic campaign to wipe out the culture of the indigenous ethnic population and replace it with an ethnic Han Chinese one loyal to the government in Beijing. China has supported a massive immigration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang, displacing the Uighurs as the main ethnic group in the region. The government has also closed down mosques in the province and arrested imams, preventing the Uighurs from practicing their religion.
For a brief time in the 1940's Xinjiang was an independent nation called East Turkestan, but was overrun by Mao's Red Army and incorporated into China. Since then the Uighurs have claimed the Chinese government has launched a campaign of discrimination aimed at erasing their culture, which has existed in the region for over a thousand years.
The Uighurs maintain that their struggle for ethnic and religious rights is a peaceful one, despite China's efforts to tie them to al-Qaeda and the Global War on Terror.
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