Published by: THE WORLD UYGHUR NETWORK NEWS October 9, 1997

Hong Kong AFP, 10/04/97

Hong Kong, Oct 4 (AFP) -- Police in Beijing have been on high alert for separatists from troubled Xinjiang province who planned a series of terrorist strikes around China's National Day, it was reported here Saturday.

Intelligence reports received by the police said the separatists planned a series of explosions in areas where there were several foreign residents, the Chinese-language Oriental Daily News said. Police were on alert throughout the city with several hundred plain-clothes officers patrolling the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, the report said.

The alert was in place for a week straddling the National Day on Wednesday before being relaxed, the newspaper said quoting unidentified sources.

Xinjiang authorities were reported to have told Beijing police that the separatists had received terrorist training and had smuggled plastic explosives, remote-control devices and items of weaponry into the country.

Chinese authorities denied Friday a report in the same newspaper of anti-Beijing unrest in northwestern Xinjiang province and neighboring Inner Mongolia in which nine officials were said to have died.

"There has not been any trouble in the past weeks in Xinjiang and the situation is very calm and stable," a regional government official told AFP in a telephone interview from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.

An official from the Bureau of General Affairs in Huhhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, gave a similar reaction, saying "the region is calm and the information is without basis." The newspaper said several officials and civilians were injured in the violence and many buildings were damaged, with the unrest aimed at local government officials as well as representatives to the National People's Congress, China's parliament.

Xinjiang province, which also borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, has seen a fresh bout of anti-Chinese sentiment and separatist attacks in the past two years.

In early February, violence erupted in Yining, a border village northwest of Xinjiang. The official report said 10 people were killed in the unrest but Uighur sources said about 100 died in the conflict. Moslem separatists also in February exploded bombs in several buses in the Urumqi, killing nine people and injuring 74 others in the first such attack in Xinjiang's capital in years.