Violent attacks on rise in China

BEIJING — The rising number of attacks in China and their growing sophistication have confounded security experts who had believed Beijing was exaggerating the threat of terrorism to justify its authoritarian practices.

Three security guards were stabbed to death Tuesday at a checkpoint near Kashgar in westernmost China, a desert region with a mostly Muslim population. The killings brought the death toll to more than 30 in eight days.

Exact numbers are hard to come by because of the secrecy imposed by the Chinese government, which is worried the attacks will put a damper on the Olympics.

Kashgar is 2,500 miles from Beijing, as far as Baghdad is from London. The attacks raise questions about the Chinese government's ability to keep a grip on its farthest-flung citizens.

"The Chinese are keen to show they are in control. They don't want to spoil the Olympic party. But there is no doubt, this is a significant escalation," said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.

The population of China's westernmost Xinjiang province is mainly Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have a long history of political violence against Chinese rule and have in the past tried to declare independence. But what used to be a local movement has been nurtured in recent years by groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who have supplied Islamic ideology and training.

In Tuesday's violence, which took place in Yamanya, attackers armed only with knives managed to kill three people and escape.

On Aug. 4, attackers surprised border guards out for a run in Kashgar by plowing into them with a dump truck, then hurling homemade explosives.

Bus bombings last month in Kunming also used explosives crafted out of the same ingredients as fertilizer.

A group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party took credit for those bombings and one in Shanghai in May.

The group, which terror experts say is a successor to one known in the 1990s as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, has released several videos threatening attacks during the Olympics.

Religious dissident in hiding after escape

BEIJING — Hua Huiqi, a religious dissident detained Sunday on his way to a church service where President Bush was to worship, has escaped from police custody, human-rights advocates and family members said.

Hua, 46, slipped away from his guards Sunday night, after they fell asleep at a makeshift detention center, and immediately went into hiding, according to relatives and an e-mail message that he sent to the organization Human Rights in China.

Public security agents also seized his 52-year-old brother, Hua Huilin, as the two biked to the church, but he was released within hours.

The older Hua said that both men had been roughed up and warned that their legs would be broken if they kept trying to attend services at Kuanjie Protestant Church, an officially sanctioned congregation where Bush and his family worshipped on Sunday.

The younger Hua, an advocate for religious freedom, is the pastor of a "house church," an underground congregation that operates outside China's controlled religious bureaucracy. He has been arrested, jailed and beaten several times.

Also

An activist group said up to eight pro-Tibet protesters were detained by police near an Olympics venue. Rights group Students for a Free Tibet said today that two of their members hung a banner that said "Free Tibet" in the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park near the National Stadium. The group said another five or six members handcuffed themselves together and to bicycles at the front gate of the park.

All were detained by police and plainclothes agents, the group said. Police did not immediately comment.

Seattle Times news services