32 Chink Police Bombed In Western China! Commies Strive To Hush It
Up!

"Truck, Grenade Attack in China Kills 16 Policemen"

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 4, 2008; A07

BEIJING, Aug. 4 -- Two assailants crashed a dump truck into a
paramilitary police station in the restive Xinjiang region Monday and
tossed out two grenades, killing 16 policemen and wounding 16 others
in an apparent terrorist attack, the official New China News Agency
reported.

Witnesses said the two explosions boomed out about 8 a.m. in the heart
of Kashgar, an oasis town on the route of the ancient Silk Road more
than 2,000 miles west of Beijing and near the Chinese borders with
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The region's overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic Uighur population has long
chafed under Han Chinese rule. According to Chinese security
officials, Uighur extremists have plotted to carry out terrorist
strikes during the Beijing Olympics, which start Friday.

Chinese authorities said they had arrested the assailants but did not
specify whether they were Uighurs or explain their motives.

The grenade attack was the deadliest single strike against Chinese
authorities in some time, although security officials say a spate of
separatist bombings in the 1990s killed a number of people.

"I heard two explosions around 8 this morning," said a receptionist in
the Seman Hotel, a favorite for tourists visiting Kashgar in search of
Silk Road ambiance. "It was only several hundred meters away. The road
was blocked [by police] immediately afterward."

The state-run news agency said those killed were patrol troops from
the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary force responsible for
putting down riots, guarding embassies and safeguarding the border.

The Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language with no relation to
Chinese, have long been the largest part of Xinjiang's population. But
increasing numbers of Han Chinese, encouraged to immigrate by the
Beijing government, which is trying to develop China's western
reaches, have grown to make up about half the region's 20 million
people.

Security officials preparing for the Olympics repeatedly have warned
that Uighur extremists, who seek to break away from Chinese rule, pose
the greatest security threat to the Games. The officials have cited
several organizations that they say maintain links to foreign-based
Islamist extremist organizations and are training Uighurs to organize
bombings and other violence.

In particular, Chinese authorities have identified the East Turkestan
Islamic Movement as a terrorist group that poses the greatest risk.
The United States also has determined the group to be a terrorist
organization, saying it has links with al-Qaeda. Three people executed
July 9 at Yengishahar, near Kashgar, were convicted of being East
Turkestan Islamic Movement members.

One day earlier, police in Urumqi, the regional capital, killed five
Uighurs in a raid on an apartment in a middle-class gated community.
Authorities accused them of preparing a holy war against Han Chinese
rule.

The Public Security Bureau announced in April that it had broken up
two Uighur terrorist cells plotting to kidnap foreigners and bomb
hotels during the Olympics. The bureau said 45 people were arrested
and accused them of ties to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

But Kuexi Maihesuti, vice president of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region, told reporters in a briefing Friday that the terrorist threat
should not be exaggerated. "The Xinjiang police have broken up three
to four terrorist groups so far this year. That's it," he said. They
"didn't have the ability to launch large-scale destructive activities
that the enemy forces would have hoped for."

Nevertheless, security in the vast region has become extremely tight.
Checkpoints have been set up along Xinjiang's main roads, and airport
security has been reinforced.

[Correspondent Jill Drew contributed to this report.]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR2008080302160....