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Attack in China Kills 16 Border Patrol Officers.

By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: August 5, 2008

BEIJING — Two men armed with knives and grenades ambushed a military police unit in Kashgar in China’s majority Muslim far northwest on Monday, killing 16 border patrol officers and wounding 16 others before being subdued and arrested, according to Chinese state media.

With just four days until the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the attack highlighted the vulnerabilities faced by the Chinese authorities as they seek to secure the capital for the hundreds of thousands of foreign athletes, journalists and visitors who have already begun arriving here.

Officials labeled the incident an act of terrorism and suggested the culprits were associated with a murky separatist movement that is seeking independence for China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic-speaking people who dominate Xinjiang Province, where the attack took place.

Details of the incident were reported by Xinhua, the official news agency, and could not be immediately independently verified.

The assault in Kashgar — an oasis city about 2,000 miles from Beijing — ranks as the deadliest outburst of violence since the early 1990s, when officials began to track anti-Chinese activity in the vast desert that stretches into Central Asia and touches on seven countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The assault in Kashgar took place just before dawn as a brigade of border patrol police was jogging outside their barracks in the center of the city. According to official media accounts, two men driving trucks rammed their vehicles into the soldiers, killing or injuring ten.

The attackers then jumped out of the trucks with knives and hacked and stabbed the soldiers. They also lobbed two grenades at the barracks “causing explosion,” the account said. The police arrested the attackers , one of whom sustained a leg injury, but did not release their names.

In Beijing, the authorities have girded the capital with soldiers, missile launchers and sidewalk cameras, and they said they were confident the Games would take place without incident. “We are prepared to deal with any kind of security threat and we are confident we will have a safe and peaceful Olympic games,” said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Organizing Committee.

Despite the capital’s ubiquitous security, a small group of dislocated residents staged a brief demonstration near Tiananmen Square on Monday afternoon to protest the lack of compensation they were given to make way for a redevelopment project. The protest, which drew a swarm of police and caused a traffic jam, was promptly broken up.

In recent years, China has waged an increasingly muscular battle against those it describes as Muslim separatists. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and China, is often blamed for much of the violence in Xinjiang.

Human rights advocates, however, say the official accounts are exaggerated to justify wide-ranging crackdowns on Uighur advocates.

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