Friday, Nov 01, 2013

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   By Jeremy Page

BEIJING--China's top internal security official blamed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which is waging a violent separatist campaign in the western region of Xinjiang, for what the government is calling a suicide attack in Beijing Monday.

Meng Jianzhu, head of a Communist Party body that oversees the police, courts and intelligence services, made the accusation in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television on Thursday, while he was in Uzbekistan for a regional security summit.

He also said the group, which China says has links to al Qaeda, was "entrenched" in central Asia and the Middle East, and he urged security services in China's neighboring countries to enhance cooperation with Beijing in combating terrorist groups.

Mr. Meng's was the first official statement linking the East Turkestan group, or ETIM, to Monday's attack, in which a sport-utility vehicle careened through a crowd of tourists, crashed into a barrier and burst into flames by the entrance to the Forbidden City off Tiananmen Square. Five people were killed--three inside the vehicle and two tourists, according to state media.

Police have identified the three people in the car and five others detained as suspects, according to state media. The addresses provided in police notices were all in Xinjiang, and their names suggest they were all from that region's mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.

Xinjiang abuts Pakistan, Afghanistan and several other Central Asian countries, and a Uighur separatist movement has flared sporadically, sometimes violently, for decades. Beijing has attributed dozens of attacks to ETIM, mostly relatively small-scale knife attacks or crude bombings inside Xinjiang and involving people from the immediate area.

The allegation that ETIM carried out a much more audacious strike on China's most politically sensitive site, possibly involving people from different parts of Xinjiang, suggests to some terrorism experts that its capabilities and ambitions are evolving.

Neither Mr. Meng nor other Chinese officials have provided details of ETIM's involvement. Terrorism experts say the fiery crash off Tiananmen Square was unusual for a suicide attack because it involved three members of the same family and no explosives, only gasoline.

Uighur activists abroad have said Chinese statements on the crash should be regarded with skepticism until independently verified. Some exiled Uighurs and foreign experts on Xinjiang and terrorism say the Chinese government has exaggerated the links between ETIM and al Qaeda and that most separatist unrest is driven by personal grievances against Chinese policies.

The official Xinhua news agency said Mr. Meng had briefed officials from the antiterrorism agency of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security grouping that includes China, Russia and four central Asian nations.

"This violent terrorist incident that happened in Beijing was an organized and premeditated operation," Mr. Meng said in his interview with Phoenix. "Its instigator behind the scenes was the East Turkestan Islamic Movement that is entrenched in the central Asian and west Asian regions."

Mr. Meng didn't mention specific countries where China believes ETIM still has a presence. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, both home to Uighur communities, have clamped down on separatist groups over the past decade at China's request, according to terrorism experts. Chinese officials also in the past have accused the group of training members at camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Chinese and foreign experts mostly agree that there has been a steady increase in separatist unrest in Xinjiang over the last four or five years and that some of the Uighurs involved appear to have been influenced by Islamic extremism.

However, while Chinese experts tend to attribute the violence to ETIM, foreigners studying the matter often see it as rooted in resentment of China's policies in Xinjiang. Many Uighurs resent an influx of migrants from China's Han majority while some Han migrants complain that Uighurs benefit from preferential policies giving them special access to some jobs and schooling. The regional capital, Urumqi, exploded in deadly interethnic violence that left about 200 people dead in 2009.

"I don't think there's been any meaningful spillover from Pakistan and Afghanistan," said Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund, who has studied China's policies in Xinjiang.

China successfully lobbied the U.S. and the United Nations to include ETIM on their lists of terrorist organizations after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

U.S. authorities detained 22 Uighurs at the Guantanamo Bay prison after they were captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 on suspicion of fighting or training with al Qaeda and local Islamic militants.

But U.S. officials have said the detained Uighurs don't represent an international terrorist movement, and they all since have been released or cleared for release. China has protested the release of the Guantanamo Uighurs, who were resettled in countries including Bermuda, El Salvador and the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau.

Write to Jeremy Page at jeremy.page@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

01-11-13 1534GMT