Jane Macartney, Urumqi

Following news that 1,434 people had been arrested for Sunday's riots, some 300 Muslim ethnic Uighurs confronted heavily-armed riot police in the city of Urumqi demanding the release of family members they said had been arbitrarily arrested in the crackdown following the weekend bloodshed, which left 156 dead and more than 800 wounded.

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 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 angry Uighurs protesting Beijing rule at the weekend.

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

Just hours earlier, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party boss of Xinjiang, the only Muslim majority region in China, said the unrest had been quelled. However, he warned "this struggle is far from over".

The streets of Urumqi, a city closer to Tehran than to Beijing, were almost deserted except for mobs of Han Chinese carrying wooden sticks or iron staves who swaggered past shuttered shop fronts. At one point the ethnic tensions spilled over with Han eager to take revenge for the dozens of deaths – mainly of Han stabbed by marauding gangs of Uighurs – at the weekend.

In front of one bank 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 the two men. The police bundled them into a small van. At once, several Han 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 then drove the two Uighur men to safety.

“We will stand united. We Han are together in this,” the crowd chanted.

Two young women outside a closed department store suddenly turned and ran as they saw a group of about seven Uighur men strolling down the opposite side of the road. One man shouted: “Let’s get together to defend ourselves.”

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 also 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 ethnic anger in the volatile region of some 20 million people, about half of them Muslim Uighurs.

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

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