BEIJING, May 23 -- On a cloudy and quiet Thursday morning, the market near People's Park in Xinjiang's Urumqi came to life with peddlers and residents as usual.

With drizzle softly dampening their shoulders, local elders leisurely walked through the market, stopping from time to time to greet each other.

Suddenly, two vehicles without license plates broke through roadside fences and plowed into the people going about their daily business.

"Boom! Boom!" Explosive devices were set off. In a second, the tranquil and harmonious market became an inferno.

"Four senior citizens were run over and killed in front of me."

"The cars went past near my stall, an old man near us was hit and I was in fear for my life."

"People were screaming and crying. There was blood on some of them. It was horrible."

These were some of the accounts witnesses told Xinhua.

The latest figures say the terror attack killed at least 31 people and injured 94 others.

SURGING TERROR ATTACKS WORLDWIDE

What happened on Thursday morning in Urumqi was nothing short of terror. It is not the first attack to target ordinary people, and it surely won't be the last.

The international community has seen a surge in terrorist attacks recently, with hundreds of people being killed, injured or kidnapped.

On April 30, three people, two of them suspects, were killed and 79 injured in an attack on a railway station in Urumqi.

On March 1, separatists from Xinjiang used knives to cut down over 150 innocent civilians at a train terminal in Kunming, capital city of China's Yunnan. The dead numbered 29, the injured over 130.

Last October, Xinjiang separatists drove a vehicle packed with combustibles into a crowd of tourists in Tian'anmen Square, Beijing, killing five and injuring 40.

However, China is not the only victim of terror attacks.

On May 20, twin bombings shook a market place in the central city of Jos in Nigeria, killing dozens of people and injuring many more.

On April 14, members of the militant group Boko Haram abducted more than 200 girls from a secondary school in the town of Chibok, several hundred km east of the Nigerial capital, Abuja.