Across China, Security Instead Of Celebration

On the day before the executions this month, police in Urumqi, the regional capital 600 miles northeast of Yengishahar, raided an apartment in a gated, middle-class community and killed five Uighurs who the authorities said were preparing for "holy war." The official New China News Agency, quoting Urumqi officials, said those in the apartment, 10 men and five women, wielded knives and resisted arrest when surrounded by police.

Those who survived said they had received training to launch attacks against the growing numbers of Han Chinese who have been encouraged to immigrate to Xinjiang and who now make up more than half the regional population of about 20 million, the agency said.

Separately, authorities announced in March that an alert airline crew had prevented a man and a woman from blowing up an airplane that took off from Xinjiang. They were later identified as Muslim separatists traveling on Pakistani passports.

Chen Zhuangwei, who heads the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, said that in all, police have broken up five terrorist groups in Xinjiang since the beginning of the year and have arrested 82 people on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks during the Beijing Olympics. At the same time, Chen told local media, police closed 41 training bases for holy war, interpreted as closures of unauthorized Islamic schools.

Those executed here July 9 were among 17 people convicted in nearby Kashgar of being members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-funded broadcast service, said the others were sentenced to jail terms from 10 years to life.

All were captured in January 2007, when Chinese authorities said they raided a terrorist training camp, killing 18 members of the group and arresting the 17, according to what officials announced during the execution. Several local residents said some of those killed were strangers, but others were well known in Yengishahar, a garrison town near the border with Pakistan. The executions went down poorly.

"It was not a good thing, what the Chinese did," said a Uighur witness who discussed what he saw on the condition of anonymity.

Correspondent Ariana Eunjung Cha and researcher Liu Songjie in Beijing contributed to this report.