Alleged Olympic Terrorist Act Foiled in Beijing
Last Sunday, March 9, 2008, the Chinese police had successfully foiled a terror plot targeting the Beijing Olympics. Incidentally, a flight crew had also stopped an apparent attempt to crash a China Southern flight going from Urumqi to Beijing on the same day.
The top Communist party official in the western region of Xinjiang, Wang Lequan had reported that the materials captured in a January 27 raid in the regional capital Urumqi were planned to be specifically used in sabotaging the staging of the Beijing Olympics.
Mr. Wang had also told reporters in the meeting of Xinjiang delegates in Beijing that whoever's behind these actions are not practicing any subtlety, though there were no other evidence or sources of information regarding the raid. Nor was there mention of any Olympic targets, though the suspicion is still there. The incident about the sabotaged flight crash was also mentioned in this meeting.
Other officials, such as Mr. Nur Bekri didn't specify the plane incident as a terrorist act, but will keep it under investigation. Thankfully, no passengers were injured.
These unfortunate incidents have further strengthened China's arguments to make extreme measures in order to ensure the social stability and safety of all people patronizing/ participating in the August Olympics. The continuous blows on China's integrity (scalpel tickets, astronomical hotel rates, pirated Olympics merchandise) have already bought much negative publicity, causing plenty of criticism on the current regime.
It's true that deadly violence is less common in China than in other countries; nevertheless, Beijing is still banning all private gun ownership. A recent deadly hostage drama which involved 10 Australian travel agents might have made a point against this, but officials reassure the people that this was not an embarrassment connected to the run-up to the Olympics.
The hostage taker in the aforementioned incident had been shot and killed by a police sniper, following a three-hour stand-off at the northern tourist hub called Xi'an. To now, the motive of the hostage taker remains to be seen. There are speculations that the low-intensity separatist movement called Xinjiang's Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority who hold no cultural ties to the Han majority, had caused this.
