16 Officers Killed In China Ahead Of Beijing Olympics

By CHARLES HUTZLER

BEIJING - Two men rammed a truck into a group of jogging policemen and
tossed explosives, killing 16 officers Monday in an attack in a restive
province of western China just days before the Beijing Olympics, the
state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

Though it happened on the far side of the country — near the
Afghan-Pakistan border — the attack came as security forces were on
alert for the Games, which open Friday. It was among the deadliest and
most brazen attacks in years in Xinjiang province, site of a
sporadically violent rebellion by local Muslims against Chinese rule.

About 20 people upset at having been evicted from their homes staged a
brief demonstration near Tiananmen Square, Beijing's heavily guarded
political center. Uniformed police quickly surrounded the group until
members of a neighborhood committee came and pulled the protesters
away, scuffling with some.

In the Xinjiang attack, the two men drove a dump truck into the group
of border patrol police officers as they passed the Yiquan Hotel during
a routine 8 a.m. jog in the city of Kashgar, the Xinhua News Agency
reported.

After the truck hit an electrical pole, the pair jumped out, ignited
homemade explosives and "also hacked the policemen with knives," Xinhua
said.

Fourteen died on the spot and two others en route to a hospital, and at least 16 officers were wounded, Xinhua said.

Police arrested the two attackers, one of whom was injured in the leg, the report said.

Authorities closed off streets, sealed the Nationalities Hospital down
the street from the explosion, and ordered people to stay inside, said
a man answering phones at the hospital duty office.

Local government officials declined comment Monday. An officer in the
district police department said an investigation was launched.

Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is a tourist city that was once an oasis
trading center on the Silk Road caravan routes and lies 80 miles from
the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan. Its mountainous,
remote environs have allegedly provided cover for terrorist training
camps, one of which Chinese police raided early last year.

Chinese security forces have been on edge for months, citing a number
of foiled plots by Muslim separatists and a series of bombings around
China in the run-up to the Olympics. Last week, a senior military
commander said radical Muslims who are fighting for what they call an
independent East Turkistan in Xinjiang posed the single greatest threat
to the games.

A spokesman for Beijing's Olympic organizing committee said he did not
have enough information to comment on the bombings. But he said
security arrangements were being increased around the Olympic venues.

"We've made preparations for all possible threats," the spokesman, Sun
Weide, told reporters. "We believe, with the support of the government,
with the help of the international community, we have the confidence
and the ability to host a safe and secure Olympic Games."

A Chinese counterterrorism expert, Li Wei of the China Institute for
Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, said the attack was
likely the work of local sympathizers, rather than trained terrorists
who sneaked across the border into China.

Xinhua said that Xinjiang's police department earlier received
intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks between Aug. 1
and 8 by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The movement is the name
of a group that China and the U.S. say is a terrorist organization, but
Chinese authorities often use the label for a broad number of violent
separatist groups.

In Xinjiang, a local Turkic Muslim people, the Uighurs (WEE'-gurs),
have chafed under Chinese rule, fully imposed after the communists took
power nearly 60 years ago. Occasionally violent attacks in the 1990s
brought an intense response from Beijing, which has stationed crack
paramilitary units in the area and clamped down on unregistered mosques
and religious schools that officials said were inciting militant action.

Uighurs have complained that the suppression has aggravated tensions in
Xinjiang, making Uighurs feel even more threatened by an influx of
Chinese and driving some to flee to Pakistan and other areas where they
then have readier access to extremist ideologies.

One militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, pledged in a video
that surfaced on the Internet last month to "target the most critical
points related to the Olympics." The group is believed to be based
across the border in Pakistan, with some of its core members having
received training from al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban, according to
terrorism experts.

Terrorism analysts and Chinese authorities, however, have said that
with more than 100,000 soldiers and police guarding Beijing and other
Olympic co-host cities, terrorists were more likely to attack
less-protected areas.