CHINESE POLICE killed seven kidnappers, whom they said had links to Muslim extremists, in the western region of Xinjiang yesterday, the latest violent incident in the resource-rich and strategically key province that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several central Asian states.
The kidnappers took two people hostage late on Wednesday in Pishan county in the far southern part of the province, near the borders of India and Pakistan, according to official media.
“The assailants resisted arrest and launched assaults, killing one police officer and injuring another,” ran a report on tianshan.net.
Seven of the suspects were shot dead and four were wounded and caught, said the report. The two hostages were freed.
The Xinhua news agency said militants were trying to introduce an extreme form of Islam, and quoted police in Pishan telling of a case where a man was murdered for drinking alcohol.
One resident told Xinhua the Uighur lifestyle “had been seriously affected” by the rise of an “extremist atmosphere in recent years”.
Chinese officials have accused militant Uighurs of working with supporters in Pakistan to plan attacks in Xinjiang.
A simmering separatist campaign in the region has occasionally boiled over into violence over the past 20 years.
The worst violence in recent years occurred during the deadly riots of July 2009, when local Uighurs savagely turned on Han Chinese in Urumqi – an incident that led to deadly reprisals a few days later.
Nearly 200 people were killed in the riots, mostly ethnic Han Chinese, and 1,700 were injured.
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 – since the days of the “Great Game” played for influence in the region between Britain and Russia.
Earlier this year, Beijing sent its elite Snow Leopard commandos to Xinjiang after fresh outbreaks of deadly ethnic violence in the troubled region.
The Han Chinese see Xinjiang as an inalienable part of the territory of China, and Beijing blames separatist Uighur Muslims from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, who it says trained in militant camps in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, human rights groups believe Beijing exaggerates the threat from militants to justify harsh controls.
Xinjiang’s eight million Turkic-speaking Uighurs are a Turkic Muslim ethnic group that shares close linguistic and cultural links to central Asia, and is quite distinct from China’s majority Han.
Uighurs see Xinjiang as their homeland and resent the millions of Han Chinese who have poured into the region in recent decades, a migration they describe as cultural imperialism driven by Beijing.