The public announcement of the sentences awarded to the 17 Uighurs came a day after the police of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, forcibly entered a flat to arrest 15 Uighurs, who were also projected as members of the IMET. Five of them were killed by the police when they allegedly resisted arrest. The Chinese also ordered the closure of 40 mosques in Xinjiang on the ground that they had been started illegally.
The Chinese authorities have not yet revealed the identities of the two terrorists who carried out the attack of August 4. They are presumed to be Uighurs, but normally the Uighurs do not follow the modus operandi of slitting the throats of their victims. This is the typical MO of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),the Islamic Jihad Union (IMU), another Uzbeck organisation, and the Pakistani terrorist organisations as well as of Al Qaeda and theTaliban.
The attacked border post was near the border with Tajikistan. The two terrorists are suspected to have infiltrated into the area from Tajikistan. The IMET, which is the main organisation of the anti-Beijing Uighurs, the IMU, the IJU and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Pakistan had operated in the bordering areas of Tajikistan in the past. Before 9/11, the HUJI used to have a training camp in Tajikistan for training recruits from Xinjiang and the Central Asian Republics.
In January, 2008, the Ministry of Public Security had claimed to have neutralised an Uighur sleeper cell in Urumqi. This was followed on March 7, 2008, by an aborted attempt by threeUighurs--one of them a woman-- to blow up a civil aviation plane going from Urumqi to Beijing with the help of gasoline concealed inside a soft drink can, which had been smuggled into the plane. The attempt was thwarted by alert security guards on board the plane. The fact that the airport security at Urumchi allowed the can to becarried-- when all over the world there is a ban on such cans and bottles beingcarried-- spoke poorly of the physical security at some Chinese airports,
The News of Pakistan reported online on March 21, 2008, that two of the suspectsarrested-- a woman and a man-- travelled with Pakistani passports. The woman was described as an Uighur living in Pakistan and trained in a Pakistani jihadi camp and the man as a Central Asian (Uzbeck?). The third person, who escaped, but was subsequently arrested, was described as a Pakistani, who had masterminded the plot. The meagre facts given out by the Chinese authorities about the thwarted plot indicated deficiencies in the physical security set-up in China. It is such deficiencies, which the jihadi terrorists wanting to disrupt the Olympics will exploit.
There was a demonstration against the Chinese authorities at Khotan in the Xinjiang province on March 23, 2008. About 1,000 Uighurs, including many women, participated in the demonstration. The protest was triggered off by two events. Firstly, the alleged death in the custody of the Ministry of Public Security of Mutallip Hajim, a wealthy jade trader and popular philanthropist, who had been arrested on a charge of belonging to the sleeper cell discovered in January, 2008.