According to witnesses, the assailants were a group of 18 young Uyghur men who opposed the local government's campaign against the burqa, which had grown popular among older Hotan women in 2009 but were also used in a series of violent crimes.

[4] The city receives few domestic tourists because of terrorism fears, but southern Xinjiang officials are trying to integrate the region into the international economy by creating a special economic zone in nearby Kashgar.

[5][6] Most visibly, since the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, many religious Hotan women of an older age began to wear a long face-concealing Islamic garment, which is more similar to the uniform of the female Chechen suicide bomber than to traditional Uyghur attire.

[4] According to a subsequent investigation, a group of 18 anti-government religious extremists arrived in Hotan from Kashgar on 16 July 2 days before the attack; they brought "several dozen different knives including cleavers, axes and switchblades" with them.

[11] According to witnesses, the men approached the gates of the Nuerbage (Naarburg) Street police station around noon with weapons concealed in cardboard boxes, stabbing a Uyghur security guard to death when they got close enough.

[2] After killing Eli, the men shouted slogans in Uyghur denouncing the government's campaign against the Islamic veil, in what onlookers described as Kashgar and Aksu accents.

[2] The Xinjiang regional government called the incident an organized, "long-planned"[13] "terrorist attack",[12] and a team from China's national counter-terrorism office was sent to Hotan to investigate the causes of the violence.

[15] On 13 August, the elite counterterrorist Snow Leopard Commando Unit was deployed to Hotan and Kashgar to secure the cities ahead of the China-Eurasia Expo in September.

[16] The anti-China[14] pro-Uyghur independence[5] World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Germany claimed that the attack was preceded by the violent suppression of a peaceful protest two hours earlier.

[9] WUC spokesperson Dilxadi Rexiti (迪里夏提, also known as Dilxat Raxi) accused the authorities of lying, rhetorically asking "If the attack was premeditated, why didn't the police take precautions".

[11] Both the director of the Institute of Central Asia at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences and Chinese counter-terrorist expert Li Wei alluded to the influence of foreign terrorist organizations in the attack without mentioning any specific country, which The Times of India claimed referred to Pakistan.

4 were given death sentences, and 2 were given 19-year jail terms, for charges including "leading and organizing a terror group, manufacturing illegal explosives, intentional homicide, [and] arson".