From Volume 38, Issue 31 of EIR Online, Published August 12, 2011
Asia News Digest

Saudi-Indoctrinated Wahhabis Spread Terror in China

Aug. 1 (EIRNS)—Killings and bomb explosions in central Kashgar, a major trading center in western China's Xinjiang province, over the weekend, made China suspicious that the Wahhabi-indoctrinated terrorists are trying to rev up the local Uyghurs to create chaos and destabilize the area. The weekend terrorist attacks may have killed at least 18 people, some of whom were reportedly policemen.

Local Chinese officials have claimed that these jihadi extremists were trained in Pakistan. The officials said the detainees have admitted that at least one of the group's leaders was trained in making explosives and firearms at camps of the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) in Pakistan before infiltrating back into China.

According to an Indian intelligence report, well-informed Pakistani police sources said President Hu Jintao had phoned President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to express his concern over the stepped-up activities of the IMET in the Xinjiang province a month before an international expo is to be held in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, Sept. 1-5.

Following that telephone conversation, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director-general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), rushed to Beijing to discuss with the Chinese authorities their concerns over likely threats to the Urumqi Expo from IMET elements operating from sanctuaries in North Waziristan in Pakistan. The IMET is one of the affiliates of al-Qaeda.

Urumqi had undergone violent riots in 2009 and at the time the local government officials had blamed those riots on unemployed Uyghur migrants living in the city. Beijing also said the riots were planned abroad by the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which they say is a terrorist organization and whose president, Rebiya Kadeer, is also a terrorist. The WUC was formed in April 2004 in Munich, Germany, as a collection of exiled Uyghur groups including the Uyghur American Association and the East Turkestan National Congress. Kadeer, a businesswoman and political activist, has been in exile in the United States since 2005 after six years imprisonment in China for allegedly leaking state secrets.

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