China says terrorist cell broken up; 10 arrested

Officials say the Islamic separatists from the Xinjiang region represent the 'main terrorist threats' facing the country. Human rights groups express skepticism.

Reporting from Beijing —

Chinese officials announced Thursday that they had broken up a cell of Islamic separatists from the restive Xinjiang region of the northwest who they said represented the "main terrorist threats" facing the country.

At a news conference in Beijing, public security officials displayed photographs of knives, hatchets, bullets and homemade explosives said to have been confiscated between July and October from members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. East Turkestan is the name used by many Uighurs for Xinjiang.

"This once again proves that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and other organizations are the main terrorist threats our nation faces presently and in the near future," said Wu Heping, a spokesman for the public security ministry

Ten people were arrested, two of whom were identified as ringleaders, Abudurexiti Abulaiti, 42, and Yiming Semair, 33. The men were said to have connections to an international terrorist who had been "dispatched from abroad" to conduct terrorist activities in Xinjiang.

The Chinese announcement elicited skepticism from human rights advocates, who say China has a history of inflating terrorism threats in order to justify repression of minorities. The timing of the news conference was also questioned, coming shortly before the one-year anniversary of massive ethnic riots in Xinjiang's capital city of Urumqi, where more than 200 people, mostly Han Chinese, were killed.

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