Beijing - Chinese police have arrested 35 terrorist suspects
accused of planning to kidnap Olympic athletes, spectators and
journalists, the Public Security Ministry said Thursday.
The group had set up a network in at least four cities in China's
central Asian region of Xinjiang, recruiting explosives experts and
planning suicide bombings in the regional capital and other Chinese
cities, ministry spokesman Wu Heping told reporters.
Police arrested the 35 suspects between late March and early
April, seizing 9.5 kilograms of raw material for explosives, eight
detonators, two explosive devices and some ''holy war' publicity
material,' Wu said.
'Investigation has already shown that in November 2007, this
violent terrorist group plotted to kidnap foreign journalists,
tourists and athletes during the Beijing Olympics to attract
international attention and realize their aim of destroying the
Beijing Olympics,' he said.
Wu said a suspect named Abdul Rehman was accused of leading the
group, including the recruitment of suicide bombers and people to
make guns and explosives.
In January, Xinjiang police had arrested another 10 suspected
members of a terrorist group who confessed to planning attacks during
the Beijing Olympics in August, he said.
'Police investigations indicated that the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement (ETIM) terrorist group sent separatists from abroad to carry
out violent terrorist attacks against the Beijing Olympics,' Wu said.
The 10 suspects had confessed to secretly recruiting and training
members, raising money to buy explosives, and ordering surveillance
of hotels, government buildings and military facilities in Beijing
and Shanghai, he said.
'After 13 remote explosive and poisonous device experiments, they
had planned to start terrorist attacks using explosives and poison in
Beijing and Shanghai starting this May to wreck the Olympics,' Wu
said.
Wang Lequan, the regional secretary of China's ruling Communist
Party, last month said a suspected ETIM terrorist group raided by
special forces in Xinjiang in January had plotted an attack on the
Beijing Olympics. It was not clear if Wu was talking about the same
group on Thursday.
Many members of the Uighur ethnic group favour independence from
China for the region they call East Turkestan, and a few of them have
staged small-scale terrorist attacks in the past.
The government said terrorists were responsible for 200 incidents
that killed 162 people in Xinjiang from 1990-2001, but almost no
terrorism-related incidents have been reported there in recent years.
In January 2007, China said its forces killed 18 suspected
terrorists and destroyed an ETIM training camp in Xinjiang, claiming
evidence that ETIM had more than 1,000 members trained by al-Qaeda.
International experts cast doubt on China's account of the
incident and questioned whether ETIM had remained active in Xinjiang
since 2003.
Xinjiang is a vast, traditionally Muslim region that borders
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.
More than 60 per cent of its 20 million people are from the
Uighur, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Hui, Mongol and other ethnic minorities,
according to government statistics.
Millions of ethnically Chinese people have migrated to the region
since it came under Communist Party control in 1949.
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