Author: Charles Hutzler
Publication: Associated Press
Date: August 4, 2008
Two men rammed a truck into a clutch of jogging
policemen and tossed explosives, killing 16 officers Monday, state media said,
in an attack in a restive province of western China just days before the Beijing
Olympics, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Though it happened on
the far side of the country - near the Afghan-Pakistan border - the attack
came as security forces were on alert for protests or any disruptions during
the Games, which open Friday. It was among the deadliest and most brazen attacks
in years in Xinjiang province, site of a sporadically violent rebellion by
local Muslims against Chinese rule.
About 20 people upset at having been evicted
from their homes staged a brief demonstration near Tiananmen Square, Beijing's
heavily guarded political center. Uniformed police quickly surrounded the
group until members of a neighborhood committee came and pulled the protesters
away, scuffling with some.
In the Xinjiang attack, the two men drove
a dump truck into the group of border patrol police officers as they passed
the Yiquan Hotel during a routine 8 a.m. jog in the city of Kashgar, the Xinhua
News Agency reported.
After the truck hit an electrical pole, the
pair jumped out, ignited homemade explosives and "also hacked the policemen
with knives," Xinhua said.
Fourteen died on the spot and two others en
route to a hospital, and at least 16 officers were wounded, Xinhua said.
Police arrested the two attackers, one of
whom was injured in the leg, the report said.
Authorities closed off streets, sealed the
Nationalities Hospital, down the street from the explosion, and ordered people
to stay inside, said a man answering phones at the hospital duty office.
Local government officials declined comment
Monday. An officer in the district police department said an investigation
was launched.
Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is a tourist
city that was once an oasis trading center on the Silk Road caravan routes
and lies 80 miles from the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Its mountainous, remote environs have allegedly provided cover for terrorist
training camps, one of which Chinese police raided early last year.
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. Last week, a senior
military commander said radical Muslims who are fighting for what they call
an independent East Turkistan in Xinjiang posed the single greatest threat
to the games.
A spokesman for Beijing's Olympic organizing
committee said he did not have enough information to comment on the bombings.
But he said security arrangements were being increased around the Olympic
venues.
"We've made preparations for all possible
threats," the spokesman, Sun Weide, told reporters. "We believe,
with the support of the government, with the help of the international community,
we have the confidence and the ability to host a safe and secure Olympic Games."
A Chinese counterterrorism expert, Li Wei
of the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations in Beijing,
said the attack was likely the work of local sympathizers, rather than trained
terrorists who sneaked across the border into China.
Xinhua said that Xinjiang's police department
earlier received intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks between
Aug. 1 and 8 by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The movement is the name
of a group that China and the U.S. 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 (WEE'-gurs), have chafed under Chinese rule, fully imposed after
the communists took power nearly 60 years ago. 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 that officials said were inciting militant action.
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 Turkistan 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-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban, according to terrorism
experts.
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.