China says it thwarted Olympic terrorist plot

The Public Security Ministry said 45 people from two terrorism cells in and around Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, were arrested in January and last week.

Ministry officials said authorities had seized explosives, poisons, detonators and literature calling for a jihad, or holy war. The suspects confessed to planning to blow themselves up in Urumqi and to attack hotels and government and military buildings in Shanghai and Beijing, the ministry said.

"The terrorism group was secretly recruiting members in China . . . and many times they sent members abroad for training," ministry spokesman Wu Heping said at a news conference. "Their aim was to undermine the Beijing Olympics."

But authorities offered little evidence to support the claim, leading to some skepticism. Human rights experts say China previously has exaggerated claims of terrorist plots as an excuse to crack down on restive elements of its population.

With embarrassing protests taking place inside and outside the country, including in San Francisco, where officials Wednesday changed the route of the Olympic torch relay to avoid demonstrators, the Chinese government has been rounding up potential troublemakers in its western provinces.

Ministry officials said the suspects were part of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a little-known group from the nation's west. East Turkestan is a name sometimes used by Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic people, to refer to the Xinjiang region.

In 2002, the United States labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist group. Uighurs were implicated in several bus explosions in Urumqi in the mid-1990s, but since 1997 it has been thought that Uighur separatism was on the decline.

Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, noted that Xinjiang has many criminal gangs that have weapons and often use explosives for illegal mining.

"China has a long history of conflating all sorts of incidents under the label of terrorism. . . . If this is true, it has international implications because of the targeting of athletes, but Beijing needs to provide hard evidence," Bequelin said.