BEIJING — Two men armed with knives and explosives ambushed a military police unit in China’s majority Muslim northwest on Monday. State media reported the attackers killed 16 officers and wounded 16 others, likely making it the deadliest outburst of ethnic violence in China since at least the early 1990s.
The assault took place 2,100 miles from Beijing, but it added to security concerns in the capital as tens of thousands of foreign athletes, journalists and spectators begin to arrive for the opening of the Olympic Games on Friday.
Chinese security officials have claimed for months that extremists in the Xinjiang region, where the dominant ethnic Uighur population is mainly Muslim, pose a terrorist threat to the Olympics.
Many Western experts say that China has provided little information to back up its claim that Uighur extremists have the capacity or the intention to stage major terrorist attacks. Beijing has suppressed ethnic Uighurs and kept Xinjiang under tight military control primarily to prevent a challenge to Han Chinese rule in the vast desert region that borders Central Asia, some experts say.
Even so, the brazen attack on a paramilitary police unit in Kashgar, an ancient oasis city on the Silk Road that has been a hotbed of unrest, followed a spate of smaller bombings or attempted bombings elsewhere in China in recent weeks. The bombings received relatively little attention from the Chinese and Western media, but they appear to have rattled the Chinese leadership as the country prepares to host a parade of dignitaries, including President Bush.
The attack also underscores the ethnic instability China faces in its western regions. In the spring, Tibetans in the southwest erupted in sustained riots against Chinese rule, prompting the authorities to dispatch tens of thousands of troops and arrest hundreds of monks and activists accused of promoting the exiled Dalai Lama or stoking anti-Chinese sentiment, overseas Tibetan groups say.
China’s official Xinhua news agency said Monday that the police had arrested the two men responsible for the attack in Kashgar. The agency quoted the police as saying they suspected that it was a terrorist attack.
Even before the assault, the authorities seemed on alert for plots against the Games. Beijing has been girded with soldiers, missile launchers and sidewalk cameras. The heavy surveillance did not prevent a small protest near Tiananmen Square on Monday by people who said they had not been compensated after their homes were demolished for a redevelopment project, but a swarm of police officers rapidly broke it up.
Officials say they remain confident the events will take place without incident.
“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, a spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee.
Officials of the International Olympic Committee said they were also confident that security in the capital would be more than adequate when the Games began. “We all feel the Chinese authorities have done everything possible to assure the safety and security of everyone attending the Games,” said Giselle Davies, a spokeswoman for the I.O.C.
According to Xinhua, two men driving a dump truck rammed it into a brigade of border patrol police officers as they jogged outside their barracks near the center of Kashgar, killing or wounding 10 officers. The attackers then jumped out of the truck, stabbing officers with knives, and then lobbed homemade bombs at the barracks, which exploded outside the compound, Xinhua said.
Officers, part of the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary guard force, arrested the assailants, whom they described as Uighurs, ages 28 and 33, but did not release their names. Xinhua said the arm of one man was badly injured when an explosive device detonated in his hand. The police later discovered 10 more such devices and what it described as a “homemade gun” in the dump truck.
Images reportedly taken from local Kashgar television and briefly posted on the Internet showed bodies shrouded in white sheets or on stretchers. The attack, however, received no mention on the evening news in Beijing.
If the details as reported by Xinhua are accurate, the attack would be the worst eruption of ethnic violence on Chinese soil since the early 1990s, when China blamed Muslim separatists for a spate of violent attacks.
In recent years, China has waged an increasingly muscular battle against those it describes as radical Muslims. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and China, is blamed for much of the violence in Xinjiang. The attacks, as recounted by the Chinese government, often involve bombings of police stations, buses, factories and oil pipelines.
Human rights advocates say the official accounts are often exaggerated to justify crackdowns on Uighur advocates.
Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group based in Germany, said that the government had been systematically repressing the culture and religion of Xinjiang residents, and that such policies were radicalizing a growing number of people. “These policies are forcing more Uighurs to turn to more militant protest,” he said.
Chinese security strategists have cited groups like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as the greatest threat to the Olympics. At a news conference last week, officials said a crackdown on Uighur separatists this year had led to the arrest of 82 people who the officials said were plotting to disrupt the Games through acts of terrorism.
Last month, the authorities executed two men and meted out heavy sentences to 15 others who the government said were members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The men were seized during a raid on what officials said was as a terrorist training camp. Also last month, the police raided an apartment in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and shot dead five men who they said were planning a “holy war” against the region’s ethnic Han population.
The official media have publicized other acts in recent months, including what the authorities said was a thwarted attack by three airline passengers who were planning to crash a Beijing-bound plane.
As in previous cases, the authorities presented little evidence to back up their claims. Yitzhak Shichor, a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Haifa in Israel who specializes in the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, voiced doubt that the attack in Kashgar had been an act of terrorism.
He said he thought the government was trying to continue its vilification of the group, which, if it exists at all, does not have the personnel or weaponry to carry out a sophisticated attack. “I am very skeptical of this kind of information that comes only from Chinese sources,” he said.
But Li Wei, a counterterrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said he thought the attack bore the hallmarks of Uighur separatists determined to grab the spotlight when the world was focusing on China.
It is unclear whether the attack on Monday was related to a larger plot that included several smaller bombings in parts of China, including bus explosions in the cities of Kunming and Shanghai.
Another self-described Uighur Muslim separatist group, Turkestan Islamic Party, released a video dated July 23 that featured a statement by a Commander Seyfullah claiming responsibility for the two bus explosions and making broader threats against the Olympics.
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