Chinese police have broken up 12 terrorist cells in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang in a pre-Olympic security blitz this year, state-controlled press said yesterday.
The groups were dismantled by police in the remote oasis city of Kashgar, Beijing News quoted a local official as saying, adding that all had links to international terrorist groups.
The announcement by Huang Sanping (黃三平), the city’s deputy Chinese Communist Party chief, was the latest in a series of recent revelations by China aimed at highlighting an alleged Muslim terror threat to next month’s Beijing Olympics.
US-based Radio Free Asia has said that two Muslims convicted of terrorism were executed in Kashgar last week and another 15 sentenced to jail.
The official Xinhua news agency said last week that 82 suspected terrorists, who were plotting attacks on the Olympics, had been arrested so far this year.
It also said five “terrorists” were shot dead in a raid in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi last week.
Human rights groups and exiled members of the Uighur ethnic minority allege China has fabricated or exaggerated the terrorist threat as an excuse to crush all forms of dissent in Xinjiang, where Beijing’s rule is unpopular.
It was not immediately clear whether the 12 groups allegedly broken up by Kashgar police included those announced earlier.
China has released no evidence of its terror plot claims.
Huang was quoted as saying the group’s members were “jobless drifters, ex-convicts” or people “disgruntled with society.” There was no mention of what they were allegedly plotting to do or if any weapons had been found.
All of the cells were said to be sub-branches of international terror groups, including the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM.
ETIM is listed by the UN and the US as a terrorist organization. “East Turkestan” is what many Muslims call Xinjiang.
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