Islamic Contributions to the Olympic Games
GRUESOME details emerged yesterday of Monday´s terrorist attack in western China as Beijing vowed to run a safe Olympic Games.
Witnesses said attackers in the Muslim northwestern city of Kashgar ran down police officers with a truck, set off explosives and hacked the injured with machetes.
Sixteen officers were killed in the attack, with state media blaming separatists from the Uighur ethnic group - a Turkic-speaking people who have long rebelled under Chinese rule.
"It was quite sickening to watch - my wife almost threw up and had to lie down afterwards," said Wlodzislaw Duch, a Polish tourist who watched the gruesome scene unfold across the street from his hotel room.
Mr Duch said two men who appeared to be dressed in police uniforms ploughed a truck through the group of officers.
They then tossed small explosives at the stunned police, who numbered "at least a couple of dozen".
He said the attackers leapt out of the truck and hacked at the officers on the ground with short swords resembling machetes.
Muslim men who carried out the attack were carrying documents calling for a "holy war", police said yesterday.
"On the scene, police also found two knives used in the attack and some propaganda material advocating a ´holy war´," a public security ministry statement said.
The statement said the men used explosives similar to those found in a raid on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a UN-listed terrorist organisation.
The Beijing Olympic organising committee yesterday moved to quell security fears and said authorities were confident they could deal with any kind of threat to the Games opening on Friday.
"We can guarantee a safe and peaceful Olympic Games," spokesman Sun Weide said.
He said there was still no information directly linking the attack in the Xinjiang region with the Olympics.
The massacre has also sparked a row between Japan and China.
A Japanese Nippon Television Network reporter and a Chunichi Shimbun newspaper photographer suffered minor injuries when they were detained and beaten by paramilitary police as they covered the attack in Kashgar.
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Beijing, 8 August (AKI) - Nine people were reported to have been killed on Friday in an explosion in the northwest Chinese city of Ili, in the country´s predominantly Muslim province of Xinjang.
Local sources told a correspondent from the Arab television network, al-Jazeera, that a big explosion occurred hours before the Olympic Games were due to begin in Beijing on Friday (Photo).
It was not immediately clear whether the explosion was caused by a deliberate attack or an accident.
A Jihadist group, Ansar al-Jihad, said on Thursday it planned to post a video related to attacks which killed 16 policemen in the restive northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang on Monday.
Last month a group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for several bus bombings in Shanghai and Kunming, capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan.
Turkestan is another name for Xinjiang. The province is home to several ethnic groups but is mainly made up of Muslim Uighurs, who have a Turkic language and culture.
Uighur separatists have for decades waged a campaign against Chinese rule.
crappy Chinese propaganda.
here is your chance to learn more about the real terrorism by the Chinese in Beijing
