Tue, Aug 05, 2008 page1

• Xinjiang ‘attack’ leaves 16 police dead

  CARNAGE Two men were arrested after they allegedly struck using explosives and knives, while in Beijing authorities broke up a protest in Tiananmen Square

  • AP AND AFP
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  Two men rammed a dump truck into a group of jogging policemen and then tossed explosives into their barracks yesterday, killing 16 officers and wounding others in China’s restive Central Asian border province, Xinhua news agency reported.

  The attack in Xinjiang Province came just four days before the start of the Beijing Olympics — an event that has put security forces nationwide on alert and that at least one militant Muslim group has vowed to disrupt. Xinhua, citing local police, called it a “suspected terrorist attack.”
  
  

  Xinhua said the attackers struck at 8am, plowing into the policemen performing morning exercises outside the Yijin Hotel next to their paramilitary border patrol station in Kashgar City.
  
  

  After the truck hit an electrical pole, the pair jumped out, threw homemade explosives at the barracks and “also hacked the policemen with knives,” the report said.
  
  

  Fourteen died on the spot and two others en route to a hospital while at least 16 more were wounded, Xinhua said.
  
  

  Police arrested the two attackers, one of them having been injured in the leg, the report said.
  
  

  Local government officials declined to comment yesterday. An officer in the district police department said an investigation had been launched.
  
  

  The alleged attack was one of the deadliest and most brazen in recent years in Xinjiang, where local Muslims have waged a sporadically violent rebellion against Chinese rule. Kashgar lies 130km from the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
  
  

  Chinese security forces have been on edge for months, citing a number of foiled plots by Muslim separatists and a series of bombings around China in the run-up to the Olympics, which open on Friday. Last week, a senior military commander said radical Muslims who are fighting for what they call an independent East Turkestan in Xinjiang posed the single greatest threat to the Games.
  
  

  Xinhua said that Xinjiang’s police department had received intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks between Aug. 1 and Aug. 8 by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The movement is the name of a group that China and the US say is a terrorist organization, but Chinese authorities often use the label for a broad number of violent separatist groups.
  
  

  In Xinjiang, a local Turkic Muslim people, the Uighurs, have chafed under Chinese rule. Occasionally violent attacks in the 1990s brought an intense response from Beijing, which has stationed crack paramilitary units in the area and clamped down on unregistered mosques and religious schools.
  
  

  Uighurs have complained that the suppression has aggravated tensions in Xinjiang, making Uighurs feel even more threatened by an influx of Chinese and driving some to flee to Pakistan and other areas where they then have readier access to extremist ideologies.
  
  

  One militant group, the Turkestan Islamic Party, pledged in a video that surfaced on the Internet last month to “target the most critical points related to the Olympics.”
  
  

  The group is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, with some of its core members having received training from al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, terrorism experts say.
  
  

  Terrorism analysts and Chinese authorities, however, have said that with more than 100,000 soldiers and police guarding Beijing and other Olympic co-host cities, terrorists were more likely to attack less-protected areas.
  
  

  Meanwhile, a protest by disgruntled Beijing residents broke out yesterday close to Tiananmen Square, city officials said. The group were protesting the meager compensation they were given after being forcibly removed from their homes in the Qianmen district of the city, an official at the area’s relocation office said.
  
  

  The official, who did not want to be named, said “there was some disruption and the street was blocked for some time.”
  
  

  A Xinhua report said police broke up the protest after the group voiced “dissatisfaction with government compensation for demolition of their houses” to a group of foreign media organizations.
  
  

  The report said police rushed to the site as the group, made up of three to five households, had caused a traffic jam towards the south end of Tiananmen Square.
  
  

  Tiananmen is one of the most sensitive sites for Chinese authorities, as it was the scene of weeks of pro-democracy protests in 1989.
  
  

  Many Beijing residents have been forced to move out of their homes in recent years, as the booming city clears many traditional residential areas such as Qianmen to make way for modern buildings.
  
  

  Also See: HANCOCK'S GAME: In Beijing, don’t mention the c-word
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