Olympic organisers moved to reassure the public and athletes on Monday that the Games would be safe after China’s deadliest suspected terrorist attack in more than a decade.
Sixteen police officers were killed and 16 injured in a raid on a paramilitary border police headquarters, in the north-western Xinjiang region, by what are believed to be separatists from the area.
Two men used a dumper truck to run down a group of police officers outside their station in the city of Kashgar, before knifing them and exploding home-made grenades, state news agency Xinhua reported.
After the attack, Olympic organisers indicated precautions were in place to ensure the safe running of the Games. ”We are prepared to deal with any kind of security threat and we are confident we will have a safe and peaceful Olympic Games,” said Sun Weide, an official with the Beijing organising committee.
A security force of 100 000 is on standby in Beijing, 4 000km from Kashgar. Security measures in the capital have included stationing anti-aircraft missiles near the ”Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.
Monday’s attack followed repeated claims from authorities that Uighur separatists from Xinjiang were targeting the Games. Details of the incident could not be independently verified, although witnesses reported hearing blasts and seeing the aftermath of an explosion.
At the scene outside the Yiquan hotel on Monday, the only sign of what had happened was three holes in the ground where trees had been recently uprooted, and some broken windows at the travel agent’s next door.
A visiting British couple staying in a nearby hotel said they heard an explosion. ”I was having breakfast at about 8am when I heard two or three loud bangs. They sounded like a car backfiring so I didn’t pay much attention, until later when I heard some police had been killed,” said a tourist, Sam Gunter.
He went to the police station in the afternoon where he saw 13 large, coffin-like refrigerators, but he was ushered away.
Late on Monday night there was a strong security presence at the scene, with several police cars and a group of eight paramilitaries, but journalists were relatively free to move around and report.
The Chinese authorities have identified the assailants, now in custody, as Uighur men aged 28 and 33. The official media said local police suspect the attack was a terrorist act and added that the public security bureau has suspected the region’s East Turkestan Islamic Movement of plotting an attack in the run-up to the Games, which begin on Friday.
”This is the most serious incident recorded in years,” said Nicholas Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch. ”Ahead of the Olympics, it is a very powerful symbolic attack because security in Xinjiang is at an all-time high.”
Turkic-speaking Uighur Muslims make up about eight million of the 19-million population in Xinjiang, a mineral-rich region more than three times the size of France. Many resent controls on religion, and Han Chinese immigration.
Human rights campaigners and Uighur exiles have argued that the government has exaggerated the threat of violence, and blurred the distinction between terrorism, separatist arguments and cultural expression to justify repression.
Few analysts believe Uighur militants capable of launching a major attack on Olympic venues, although they say it is hard to assess the extent of the threat because the authorities rarely offer evidence for claims to have disrupted plots.
The clampdown that followed violence in the 1990s has led to ”nervousness and tension” between Uighurs and Han Chinese, said Colin Mackerras, an expert on the region from Griffith University, Australia. He added: ”There’s an independence movement, but I don’t expect it to succeed and don’t expect many people will want to take part, because they expect it to fail and know the result will be more repression.”
Last week, the Chinese officer in charge of Olympics security said that ”east Turkestan terrorist groups” represented the greatest threat to the Games. But others suggested it was too soon to label the incident as terrorism.
Dr Andrew Fischer, a specialist on western China at the London School of Economics, said it could be a revenge attack by a tribe rather than a politically motivated action. — guardian.co.uk