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China Arrests 25
'Separatists'
From: "Tughluk Abdurazak" <tughluk@hotmail.com>
Tuesday May 1 10:04 AM ET
BEIJING (AP) - Police in China's restive Muslim northwest have arrested 25
people on charges of buying guns as part of a campaign to create an
independent Islamic republic, an official newspaper reported. The 25
were arrested Friday in Kashgar, a city near China's western border
in Xinjiang province, according to the Xinjiang Daily. Separatists there
have been waging a campaign of bombings and assassination over the last
decade, posing the most violent internal threat faced by the communist
government.
The group, formed in
October 1999 and led by a man identified in Chinese as Abuduai Nisemaiti,
had bought nine pistols and a hunting rifle, according to the Friday
edition of the Xinjiang Daily. It said police also found 100 bullets, two
bow-and-arrow sets and eight cell phones. A police
officer in Kashgar, a city about 2,100 miles west of Beijing near the
Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan borders, said she hadn't heard of the case. She
wouldn't give her name. The newspaper said the
group called for the creation of East Turkestan, named for the independent
Muslim republic that briefly existed before the communist takeover in
1949.
Sympathizers gave the group $16,000 to buy the weapons, the report said. It
didn't say whether the group was suspected of having committed violent
acts. Chinese officials
have tried to stamp out gun running and cut separatists' ties with Islamic
militants abroad, especially the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan (news
- web sites).
The separatists have mainly come from the Uighurs, the region's
largest ethnic group, which shares linguistic and religious ties to
the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.
The biggest clashes between separatists and authorities came in 1997, when
hundreds of Uighurs in Yining city rioted against Chinese rule for two
days. Bombs exploded aboard buses in the region's capital, Urumqi, and in
Beijing.
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