The three men’s bodies were found bloodied on the banks of a lake where they had been fishing on a Sunday last month, one of them slashed in the neck so deeply he was almost decapitated.

The April 27 triple slaying of three Chinese men in an ethnically Uighur section of the Xinjiang region has raised once again the specter of a new wave of terrorism roiling China.

The killings took place in a rural area about 100 miles southwest of Kashgar, one of the westernmost cities in China. President Xi Jinping was visiting that day to promote the fight against separatists and delivered a speech calling Kashgar the “front line in anti-terrorism and maintaining social stability,’’ according to the state media. Xi’s visit was also punctuated by a bombing and knife attack at a train station in Urumqi, the regional capital.

… “The tempo and tone of the attacks has increased very significantly in the last two years,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert. “These are really low-tech attacks using knives, sticks, stones and gasoline. The Chinese government likes to classify them as criminal incidents but they are not regular crimes.”