China on Tuesday vowed to crush the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) militants trained in Pakistan even as the state media highlighted their role in fomenting militancy in the strategic Xinjiang province.
A day after the attacks by ETIM terrorists claimed 22 lives in the province, Chairman of the Xinjiang regional government Nur Bekri said that the authorities would go all out to counter the violence and terrorist suspects would be given severe punishments.
For the first time, China has blamed Uygur “militants” trained in Pakistan for the deadly violence.
The authorities classified Sunday’s attack as an act of terrorism and blamed ETIM for engineering the attack, state-run Xinhu a news agency said.
Mr. Bekri, while visiting the injured in hospitals in Kashghar city, called on Han and Uygur ethnic groups to unite in the face of tragedy.
About 22 people, including two ETIM suspects, were killed in different incidents since Saturday in which militants armed with knives and daggers attacked Han settlers in Kashghar city, located close to Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, (PoK).
Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi witnessed massive riots against Hans in 2009, that left almost 200 people dead.
In two violent incidents last weekend, 14 civilians and six militants were killed in Kashgar, throwing the city into panic.
On Sunday, six civilians were killed, and 15 others — including three policemen — were injured after attackers set fire to a restaurant and started randomly killing civilians on a major shopping street.
The attacks appeared to have abated since yesterday as the Chinese forces beefed up security all over the volatile province which has been witnessing ethnic tensions.
In a related development, the official Chinese media today made a prominent mention of the Kashghar government’s allegations that the militants were trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan.
“A preliminary probe found that the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) was behind the explosion at the weekend,” the China Daily said in its editorial, ‘Fight against terrorism’
“The leaders of the group learned terrorist techniques in ETIM camps in Pakistan before they penetrated into Xinjiang,” it said, calling for stepping up the fight against terrorism in the troubled province.
Another English daily, the Global Times carried the official statement that “those captured said the group’s leaders had learned how to make explosives and firearms in camps run by the terrorist group ETIM in Pakistan before entering Xinjiang to organise terrorist activities.
Mainstream Chinese language media also pointed fingers at terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
