Attack Kills 16 Border Police in Northwest China

The Xinjiang province attack further stoked fears of acts of terrorism on the Summer Olympics -- set to start four days and 2,500 miles away in Beijing. Chinese authorities have put thousands of police and military on alert around cities hosting Olympic events.

About 20 people staged a demonstration near Tiananmen Square in Beijing Monday to protest being evicted from their homes, the Associated Press reported. Police quickly surrounded the group until members of a neighborhood committee came and pulled the protesters away.

Monday's violent raid in northwest China follows deadly bomb blasts in the southwestern city of Kunming last month and in Shanghai in May, killing a total of five people, which a Muslim militant group with ties to Xinjiang claimed responsibility for, Agence France-Presse reported.

Chinese Olympics organizers said they were checking for any link between Monday's attack and the Olympics, but immediately sought to reassure the world about security arrangements for the event.

"We have strengthened security work in all Olympic venues and in the Olympic village. We are well-prepared in security for the upcoming Games," Beijing Olympic organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide told AFP.

Xinhua, citing local police, called the assault on police a "suspected terrorist attack."

The attackers struck at 8 a.m., plowing into police officers doing their morning exercises outside a hotel next to their paramilitary border patrol post in Kashgar, Xinhua said.

After the dump truck struck an electrical pole, the men jumped out, threw homemade explosives at the barracks and "also hacked the policemen with knives," the report said.

Fourteen officers died on the spot and two others en route to a hospital, while at least 16 others were wounded, Xinhua said.

"I heard two explosions around 8 this morning," a receptionist in the Seman Hotel, a favorite for tourists visiting Kashgar in search of Silk Road ambiance, told the Washington Post. "It was only several hundred meters away. The road was blocked [by police] immediately afterward."

Xinhua said those killed were patrol troops from the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary force responsible for putting down riots, guarding embassies and safeguarding the border.

Police arrested the two attackers, one of whom had a leg injury, the AP reported. Their names were not released.

The attack was one of the deadliest and most brazen in recent years in Xinjiang province, where local Muslims have waged a sporadically violent rebellion against Chinese rule.

Local government officials declined comment Monday. An officer in the district police department said an investigation had been launched.

The exact location of the attack could not immediately be determined. Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is the name of an oasis town that was once a stop on the Silk Road caravan routes and lies about 80 miles from the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Chinese security forces have been on edge for months, citing a number of foiled plots by Muslim separatists and a series of bombings around China in the run-up to the Summer Games. Last week, a senior military commander said radical Muslims who are fighting for what they call an independent East Turkistan in Xinjiang posed the single greatest threat to the games, the AP reported.

Xinhua said that Xinjiang's police department earlier received intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks in the week preceding the Olympics by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The movement is the name of a group that China and the U.S. say is a terrorist organization, but Chinese authorities often use the label for a broad number of violent separatist groups.

In Xinjiang, a local Turkic Muslim people, the Uighurs, have chafed under Chinese rule, fully imposed after the communists took power nearly 60 years ago. Occasional violent attacks in the 1990s brought an intense response from Beijing, which has stationed crack paramilitary units in the area and clamped down on unregistered mosques and religious schools that officials said were inciting militant action.

Uighurs have complained that the suppression has aggravated tensions in Xinjiang, making Uighurs feel even more threatened by an influx of Chinese and driving some to flee to Pakistan and other areas where they then have readier access to extremist ideologies.

But human rights advocates contend that official accounts are exaggerated to justify wide-ranging crackdowns on Uighur advocates.

One militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, pledged in a video that surfaced on the Internet last month to "target the most critical points related to the Olympics." The group is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, with some of its core members having received training from al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban, according to terrorism experts.

Terrorism analysts and Chinese authorities, however, have said that with more than 100,000 soldiers and police guarding Beijing and other Olympic co-host cities, terrorists were more likely to attack less-protected areas.