Police capture terrorists plotting against Olympics
Chinese police captured and killed alleged Islamic terrorists plotting attacks targeting the Beijing Olympic Games, a senior Communist Party official said today.
Wang Lequan, the top official in the far western region of Xinjiang, said materials seized in the January 27 raid in the regional capital, Urumqi, suggested the plotter’s purpose was to “specifically to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics.”
“Their goal was very clear,” Mr Wang told reporters in Beijing.
Mr Wang offered no specific evidence and earlier reports on the raid had made no mention of Olympic targets.
The Global Times newspaper published by the Communist Party earlier reported that the group had planned bombings and other “violent terrorist incidents” on February 5, the last business day before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday.
The paper said police confiscated guns, home-made bombs, training materials and “extremist religious ideological materials” during the raid, in which two members of the gang were killed and 15 arrested.
Authorities have not identified those killed and arrested or the targets of the alleged planned attacks.
Mr Wang said the group had acted on orders from a Uighur separatist group based in Pakistan and Afghanistan called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM.
The group has been labelled a terrorist organisation by both the United Nations and the US. East Turkestan is another name for Xinjiang.
Chinese forces have for years been battling a low-intensity separatist movement among Xinjiang’s Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people culturally and ethnically distinct from China’s Han majority.
China says its main terror threat comes from ETIM, although the group is not believed to have more than a few dozen members.
Chinese forces reported raiding an ETIM training camp last year and killing 18 militants allegedly linked to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
China has ratcheted up anti-terror preparations ahead of the August Games, with the nation’s top police official last year labelling terrorism the biggest threat facing the event.
Terrorism experts have said the threat of terrorism is relatively low, given China’s tight social controls, but warned that Beijing’s counterterrorism capabilities are weak, especially in intelligence gathering and analysis.
