Terrorist suspects planned Olympic kidnap, China says (Roundup)

Apr 10, 2008, 11:12 GMT

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.