The two men who killed 16 policemen in the Kashgar massacre were today identified as members of an ethic group engaged in a shadowy insurgency in China’s north-western Xinjiang region.

The attackers, aged 28 and 33, were overcome and arrested at the scene and have been confirmed as Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic people, who make up the majority of Xinjiang’s 20 million population.

Although the official media did not spell it out there appears to be little doubt that they were members of the insurgency seeking to break Xinjiang away from China and establish an independent Islamic state of “East Turkistan”.

The separatist link emerged as the crude audacity of the attack became clear.

Expert View

Repeated warnings from the Chinese authorities of a serious terrorist threat from the Uighurs were dismissed as cries of wolf to justify a security crackdown during the Olympics

Jane Macartney

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Rather than an assault on a police station, as had been initially reported, the men in fact targeted 70 policemen from the paramilitary border patrol service as they were jogging along one of the main streets of Kashgar.

At about 8am, a lorry drove straight into the group, scattering the unarmed patrolmen before crashing into a power cable mast. The attackers jumped out and threw a pair of homemade bombs into the group before attacking the survivors with knives.

Fourteen of the police were killed at the scene, according to the state news agency Xinhua, and two others died on the way to hospital. A further 16 were injured.

Although the two killers were taken away alive, it was essentially a suicide attack – they gave no sign of having a getaway plan and there is no doubt that, after a swift trial, they will be executed.

In their language, religion, culture and origins, the Uighurs are quite distinct from the Han Chinese who dominate China’s business and politics. Separatist organisations have operated since the early 1990s, when increasing numbers of Han immigrants were encouraged to move to Xinjiang from China, creating tension with the Uighurs.

The last unambiguous attacks by Uighur separatists were in 1997 and 1998 when they carried out a series of attacks on buses, police stations, military installations, prisons and political leaders – although no attack killed more than a handful of people. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States supported Beijing in having one of the groups identified by the Chinese government, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, listed as a terror organization by the United Nations.

China says that in this year alone it has arrested 82 people for terrorist activity, including plots to kidnap Olympic athletes and an attempt to set off a bomb on a domestic flight. Last month, after people were killed by series of explosions on buses in southern China, a video claiming responsibility was posted on the Internet by a group identifying itself as the Turkistan Islamic Party. But foreign analysts have expressed doubts as to whether these were serious terrorist threats, or were exaggerated by the Chinese authorities to justify the intense security measures imposed on the country during the Olympics.

Either way the latest attack represents a drastic and unambiguous escalation of a formerly murky conflict and a blow to the safe image of China after a year which has already seen violent protests in Tibet in March and the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province in May.

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