China:China has sentenced to death or life imprisonment six Uighur activists in the far northwestern region of Xinjiant for "separatist activities".
They were said to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and were sentenced in Kashgar for taking part in "separatist activities", "illegally making explosives" and "training up a terrorist camp".
Three were sentenced to death, two received suspended death sentences and the sixth was jailed for life.
The court case follows on from an assault by Chinese police on a training facility in the Pamirs Plateau in January, during which 18 of the group were killed and 17 others arrested.
Beijing says that separatist Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are violent Islamist fundamentalists trying to cut the province off from Chinese rule.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International regularly complain about how the Uighurs are treated and accuse Beijing of using its support for Washington's "war on terror" against al-Qaeda as an excuse for clamping down on their activities.
The largest province in China, Xinjiang accounts for 16 per cent of its land area.
For hundreds of years the province has been a difficult territory to rule, something the Communist Party in Beijing is as keenly aware of as the Turkish warriors and Manchu warlords who tried in previous centuries.
At least nine people were killed in 1997 during a crackdown on a demonstration by Muslim separatists in Yining to the north. There are periodic reports of bomb blasts in Xinjiang's cities carried out by Muslim separatists.
The separatist Uighurs want to establish an independent East Turkestan state in the restive, oil-rich region that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and central Asia.
Rebiya Kadeer, a Muslim businesswoman turned activist for Uighur rights in Xinjiang, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
She was jailed for five years for providing state secrets to foreigners before her exile.
Xinjiang is home to eight million Uighurs, a Turkic, largely Islamic people who share linguistic and cultural bonds with central Asia.
Many resent the growing Han Chinese economic dominance in Xinjiang, as well as government controls on religion and culture.