The Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2011
By BRIAN SPEGELE

BEIJING—Local authorities in China’s restive Xinjiang region backed away Friday from earlier claims that assailants in a series of recent attacks there had been trained overseas, muddying the central government’s assertion that the violence is being fueled by international terror groups rather than homegrown separatists.

A spokeswoman for the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region said there was no evidence that attackers had trained in Pakistan, as authorities in Xinjiang have previously suggested, or elsewhere overseas. The regional spokeswoman, Hou Hanmin, said attackers in the region were loosely organized with no obvious links to extremists in Pakistan or elsewhere.

“These people are local, and the weapons they used are homemade,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We can’t be certain there were any ties with the outside.”

A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday declined to comment specifically on the statements but reiterated Beijing’s belief that foreign influences are involved in the unrest in Xinjiang, an arid and largely impoverished region and China’s gateway to central Asia. “In Xinjiang and Central Asia, there have been a series of violent terrorist incidents in recent years. They have all involved domestic and foreign collaboration,” said spokeswoman Jiang Yu at a regularly scheduled press briefing.

The statements by the local government contradict earlier claims by officials in the Xinjiang city of Kashgar, where more than a dozen people were killed this summer by knife-wielding Uighurs, a minority group in China that makes up a large part of Xinjiang’s population. Those officials said in statements later quoted by the state-run Xinhua news agency that the attackers had received explosives and firearms training in Pakistani-based camps affiliated with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the Chinese government has said is tied to al Qaeda and other international terror organizations.

The Pakistan finger-pointing was a significant indictment of one of China’s closest allies, particularly at a time when Islamabad faced growing scrutiny from the U.S. and others about its counterterrorism efforts. Pakistan has said it would cooperate with China in combating terrorism there.

Separately this month, the Turkistan Islamic Party, a group that seeks Xinjiang independence, released a video that claimed responsibility for this summer’s attacks, according to the Associated Press. The group is believed to be based in Pakistan, the AP said.

Ethnic tensions have grown in Xinjiang between Uighurs and China’s ethnic Han majority, who are moving to the region in increasing numbers as the Chinese government has promoted economic development there. Much of that development has unequally benefited Han migrants, further exacerbating the tensions. In one of the most devastating cases, almost 200 people were killed in 2009 in ethnic riots in the regional capital of Urumqi.

Earlier this week, China sentenced four people to death for their roles in the attacks in Kashgar and separate attacks in the city of Hotan, and two others were sentenced to 19 years in prison, state media reported.

Statements from Xinjiang officials backing away from claims this summer’s attackers had been trained overseas were reported Friday by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper.

—Kersten Zhang and Owen Fletcher contributed to this article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904491704576574412601080364.html