Group kills 16 policemen in China border patrol attack
Sixteen police officers were killed today when an unknown group rammed a border patrol station on China’s Central Asian frontier before throwing in grenades.
The Xinhua News Agency said the attackers used a dumper truck to ram their way into the paramilitary police station in Kashi and then threw in the two grenades.
Xinhua said 16 officers were also injured. Police said two attackers were arrested.
The agency did not identify the attackers, but the area has long been home to a simmering rebellion by the local Muslim Turkic people, the Uighurs, who have resented Chinese rule
The attack comes four days before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing.
A state television report gave a different version to the Xinhua account of the incident, saying the police were attacked while marching in front of a hotel during their morning drills.
Xinhua called the attackers “rioters” but did not further identify them.
An officer in the district police department said an investigation had been launched.
The exact location of the attack could not immediately be determined. Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is the name of an oasis town that was once a stop on the Silk Road caravan routes and is also the name of the surrounding region that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Chinese defence and police commanders have warned that radical Uighurs fighting for what they call an independent East Turkistan in western China pose the single greatest threat to the Olympics.
Occasional violent attacks in the 1990s brought an intense response from Beijing, which stationed crack paramilitary units and clamped down on unregistered mosques and religious schools that officials said were inciting militant action.
In recent months police claimed to have foiled a plot to blow up a Chinese passenger plane and plans by terrorist cells to kidnap athletes, journalists and others involved in the Olympics.
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 experts 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.
