A radical Islamist group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Tiananmen Square last month and warned of future attacks in the Chinese capital, according to an eight-minute audio clip obtained by a US-based internet monitoring organisation.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (Tip) is the first group to claim responsibility for the attack on October 28th, when a four- wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians near the iconic square in central Beijing killing five people and injuring dozens. Chinese authorities quickly identified the driver as Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, restive region in the country’s far northwest.
"O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened," the organisation's leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online at the weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan.
Warning
Mansour warned of future attacks by Uighur fighters, including one targeting the Great Hall of the People, a granite edifice flanking Tiananmen Square where the ruling Communist party holds many of its highest-level meetings. "The people have learned who is the real enemy and they returned to their religion," he said. "They learned the lesson."
Chinese authorities have blamed the Tiananmen Square attack on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim), a shadowy Xinjiang-based group with ostensible ties to al-Qaeda.
On Monday, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Etim was the same as the Tip, and the government would "continue the assault" on the group.
Terrorist
"This lays bare the terrorist essence of this organisation and it also allows those people who recently suspected the nature of the incident to clearly see the truth," Qin told a press briefing.
But many Xinjiang experts responded with scepticism. They say the attack was probably motivated by China’s hardline regional policies, which place severe restrictions on religious practice. Some say Etim is not organised enough to carry out a sophisticated terrorist attack.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, said Etim has reformed as the Tip in recent years; in 2012, its leader was killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan. The US department of state labelled Etim a terrorist organisation in 2002, he said.– (Guardian service)