Xinjiang: Plane Incident
The New York Times and the Washington Post have reported that a plane flying from China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to Beijing was forced to make an emergency landing last Friday because of a terrorist threat. Apparently, an Uighur woman had smuggled three bottles of gasoline on the plane, but was caught by policemen when she took them with her to the bathroom. It was unknown whether or not this incident was connected to the January police raid in the Xinjiang Province that targeted members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. In that raid, in which two people were killed and fifteen others arrested, Chinese police claimed they found evidence of a planned attack on the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
[…] Both of Weitz’s arguments are sound and the Chinese government’s actions concerning its region’s of unrest, Xinjiang and Tibet, have been unquestionably harsh and repressive in the past, but it cannot be denied that there is a real terrorist threat, from the Uighur dominated regions of China and from sources as far away as Pakistan, where some of the suspects from the March 7 plane incident were trained and hailed from. The Uighur-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) has been blamed by the Chinese government for over 200 attacks since 1990 and not all of these could have been fabricated. Here is the Council on Foreign Relations quick synopsis of ETIM and their capabilities and supposed terrorist actions. It is also important to know that the ETIM is also considered a terrorist group by the United States (Here is a good article from Global Terrorism Analysis that sums up reasons for this identification) and the United Nations Security Council. […]