Chinese police claim they have smashed seven terror cells this year in Xinjiang Province, state media reported yesterday.
The China Daily said the cells were uncovered in Kashgar, China’s westernmost city and a key center of culture for Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group that has long bridled under Chinese rule.
China has long claimed it faces a deadly threat from Muslim separatists as justification for extremely tight controls in Xinjiang, a region of vast deserts and towering mountains that borders central Asia.
No further details about the cells were given by the newspaper, which attributed the information to Zhang Jian (張健), the city’s Communist Party chief.
But it quoted Zhang as saying the region faced an ongoing threat from terrorists who “remote control” local operatives from abroad via the Internet.
“Now the battle against terror has extended to the virtual world as the terrorists use the Internet as their tool to spread their radical ideas,” he said.
However, Uighur exile groups accuse Beijing of inflating the threat as an excuse to suppress their culture and ethnic identity.
Zhang was quoted as saying Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road trading post, has seen 350 attacks resulting in the deaths of 60 government officials and civilians “since the 1990s.”
In April, China executed two Uighur men in Kashgar for what it called a “terrorist” attack last August in the city aimed at sabotaging the Olympics and that left 17 policemen dead, state media reported.
China arrested almost 1,300 people for “terrorism,” “religious extremism” and other “state security” charges in the region last year, state media said in January.
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