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.