Attack in China a terrorist strike, authorities say

Games spokesman assures security strengthened

A man was carried away by airport security for an unknown reason yesterday at the airport in Urumqi, the capital of China's far northwestern Xinjiang region. (PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)

KASHGAR, China - Authorities said they were treating a brazen attack that left 16 police officers dead and 16 others injured yesterday as a terrorist strike, China's state-run media reported. The two men arrested after the attack were members of the ethnic Uighur minority, which has long chafed under Beijing's control of northwestern China.

The incident followed the release of a video last month in which a group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party threatened attacks during the Olympic Games, which open in Beijing on Friday. Although specialists believed the group's claims were inflated, it has asserted responsibility for recent bombings around China.

The group has said it wants to draw attention to its demands to establish an independent state and end Chinese repression of Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language and have made this area 2,000 miles west of Beijing their home for centuries.

In Beijing, an Olympic spokesman said yesterday that the Chinese government has taken every precaution to try to prevent an attack at the Games. "We have strengthened security in all Olympic venues and in the Olympic village. We are well prepared to deal with any kind of threat," Sun Weide, of the Beijing Olympics organizing committee, told reporters at a news conference.

Details of the attack remained unclear yesterday and into early this morning.

Local police refused to comment at the scene and official reports in state-run media differed throughout the day.

According to the latest account in the New China News Service, an assailant rammed a dump truck into a crowd of 70 border police officers around 8 a.m. yesterday as they were jogging past the Yiquan Hotel, near their barracks, in a regular morning exercise. After the truck slammed into an electrical pole, the agency said, the assailant leapt out and attempted to throw a homemade explosive device at wounded police. The device detonated early, the agency said, blowing off one of the assailant's arms.

A second assailant threw an explosive device near the gate of the police station, a few hundred yards down the street from the hotel. It was unclear whether the second man was in the truck. Both men, ages 28 and 33, were arrested at the scene, police said. Their names were not released.

Police said they found 10 homemade explosives, a homemade handgun and four knives in the vehicle, the news agency reported. Some reports said at least one of the men tried to slash the officers with knives.

Last evening, the street where the attack occurred was reopened. Residents walked by to look at the shuttered hotel; a tarp hung over its entrance and a half-dozen of its blue-tinted windows were blown out. Police patrolled the area and briefly detained journalists attempting to photograph the site or interview onlookers. The ground under the damaged electrical pole in front of the hotel was dug up, exposing tree roots, but there were no other visible signs of the attack.

Kashgar is a tourist town that was once an oasis on the ancient Silk Road along the westernmost edge of China, near the border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Relations between the Uighurs and Han Chinese have long been tense. They have become especially tense in recent years as Han Chinese migrants have flooded the area as part of China's strategy to develop its western hinterlands. Uighurs once dominated the area, called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, but now the population is roughly 50-50.

"Fights between Uighurs and Han Chinese happen about every day on different kinds of scale," said a Chinese shopkeeper who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We feel very frightened," Gu Zainu, a 22-year-old Uighur woman who works in a downtown Kashgar pharmacy, said of yesterday's attack. "At first, rumors said there was a bombing nearby."

Gu said that since March there have been more police officers in the city.

"I heard this was done by Uighurs," Gu said. "I feel uncomfortable. I also hate them, although we are both from the same ethnicity."

The Chinese government has said a violent Uighur separatist group that calls itself the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is the greatest threat to security at the Olympic Games. Some terrorism specialists suggest that although China routinely blames the group and uses its existence to carry out oppressive policies against all Uighurs, the separatist movement is actually divided up into a number of groups with similar goals.

Xinjiang officials say so far this year they have arrested 82 and broken up five terrorist cells planning attacks related to the Games.