KYRGYZSTAN: A high-ranking Chinese diplomat has been assassinated in the capital of Kyrgyzstan in a gun attack possibly linked to Uighur separatists.The Chinese consul and his driver were gunned down in the centre of Bishkek late on Saturday, said interior ministry official Mr Omurbek Egemberdiyev.
"We have not ruled out that it is Uighur separatists drawing attention to themselves once again," he added.
He was referring to a separatist group which was founded in the early 1990s in the Xingjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region of western China with the aim of creating a fundamentalist Muslim state called East Turkestan.
It is now based mainly in the neighbouring Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Witnesses reportedly saw two young men carrying out the murder, firing with a pistol at the diplomat's Mercedes, according to the interior ministry.
The assailants then fled in another car.
The Chinese embassy could not be reached for comment.
Four Uighur separatists are appealing death sentences after being convicted over an attack on a Chinese delegation from Xingjiang who were visiting Bishkek in May 2000. Two Chinese officials were shot dead and another was wounded in that incident.
In March 2000, the head of the Uighur community in Kyrgyzstan, Nigmat Bazakov, was assassinated. According to Kyrygz officials, he was killed for refusing to back the Uighur separatist group, called Shark Azatlyk Tashkilaty (SAT), or Organisation for the Liberation of the East.
In January, a court in Kyrgyzstan condemned an Uzbek extremist to death for the murder of Bazakov.
Kyrgyz law enforcement sources said in the spring of this year that they had foiled a plot by two Uighurs to kill a Chinese diplomat and had handed them over to the authorities in China.
Uighur separatism has been cited as a source of regional insecurity at meetings of the Shanghai Organisation of Co-operation grouping China and the countries with which it shares borders.
Xinjiang contains around nine million Muslims, mainly Turkic-speaking ethnic Uighurs, who form a majority of the population despite the rapid influx of ethnic Han Chinese settlers.
Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan has freed jailed opposition protesters and policemen in an amnesty aimed at defusing a political crisis following bloody clashes, but government opponents only sneered at the gesture.
The new Prime Minister, Mr Nikolai Tanayev, whose government says that the Central Asian state could slide into civil war, urged deputies in parliament's upper house to absolve both sides involved in the violence in March from blame.
As deputies voted in support of the amnesty, a court in the south quashed the conviction of opposition deputy Mr Azimbek Beknazarov, whose arrest on charges of abuse of office in a previous job triggered the present crisis.
•A United Nations drug agency has found that drug abuse in Central Asia is taking on menacing proportions, particularly the intravenous use of heroin. A report released by the regional office of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Central Asia found that "in the past few years the problem of drug abuse in Central Asia has acquired a menacing scope". The region borders on Afghanistan and local officials have long warned that the former Soviet republics have become key trafficking routes for narcotics from Afghanistan to Russia and the West.