CHINA:TWO MEN rammed a lorry into a police barracks and attacked a group of jogging policemen in the restive Xinjiang region yesterday, killing 16 officers in what the Chinese believe was a terrorist attack four days before the Olympics in Beijing.
The assault in Kashgar, which left a further 16 police injured, took place in the Muslim-majority northwestern region that borders Central Asia.
Muslim separatist militants have waged a low-level rebellion against Chinese rule for years, but if the attack is confirmed as the work of a group such as the outlawed East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), it would be the most brazen attack yet on Chinese soil. The daring assault took place at 8am, when the attackers drove their truck into a group of policemen performing their morning exercises outside the Yiquan hotel, about 100m from their border patrol post.
Kashgar, called Kashi in Chinese, is just 120km from the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, and was once a halting point on the ancient Silk Road trade route.
The dump truck hit a telephone pole and the two attackers jumped out and threw homemade grenades at the barracks and also attacked the officers with knives. Fourteen police officers died on the spot and two others died en route to a hospital.
Police arrested the two attackers, one of whom had a leg injury. Xinhua news agency reported they were two Uighur men, aged 28 and 33. Police found home-made explosives, handguns and four knives in the vehicle.
"Everything is under investigation at the moment. It is not appropriate to discuss anything now but we will reveal the results of our investigation later," a spokesman for the Kashgar Public Security Bureau said.
Xinjiang is home to eight million Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group who share linguistic and cultural bonds with central Asia, and it is an area from where China gets much of its oil and gas.
Many Uighurs are unhappy with the growing economic and political power of ethnic Han Chinese and, like Tibetan protesters, reject what they see as cultural imperialism from Beijing.
Beijing says that separatist Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are violent Islamist fundamentalists trying to cut the province off from Chinese rule. Rights groups 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 ploy of the bloody crime resembles some previous terrorist attempts carried out by 'Eastern Turkistan' separatists, which were foiled by Chinese police," Li Wei, director of the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Studies, told Xinhua.
Security forces nationwide are on high alert, particularly since warnings from at least one militant group that it would disrupt the games. More than 100,000 security officials have been deployed for the games, which run until August 24th.
Tian Yixiang, a senior People's Liberation Army commander and Olympic security chief, said Uighur separatists were a big worry, alongside Tibetan independence forces and members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
China says it has foiled five "terrorism groups" plotting attacks on the Olympics and detained scores of people in Xinjiang for plotting to sabotage the games.
Last month, China executed two Islamic extremists after a raid on what the Chinese said was a terrorist camp in the Pamir mountains in January 2007. Authorities claimed to have killed 18 members of ETIM during the raid.
A Uighur group claimed responsibility for bus blasts in Shanghai and Kunming which killed several people last month. Also in July, police shot dead five knife-wielding Muslims and detained 10 others Xinjiang last week who allegedly wanted to launch a "holy war" against the Chinese.
The largest province in China, Xinjiang accounts for 16 per cent of its land area, and for hundreds of years the province has been a difficult territory to rule - since the days of the "Great Game" when Britain and Russia vied for influence in the region. Before that, Turkish warriors and Manchu warlords battled for control of the province.
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.