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WASHINGTON, US - THE exiled leader of China's Uighur Muslims condemned on Monday the reported killing of 16 policemen in a suspected terrorist attack in the country's Xinjiang region, but urged Beijing not to wage a crackdown on 'peaceful Uighurs'.
'We condemn all acts of violence', Ms Rebiya Kadeer said in Washington, where she has been living in exile since 2005 after spending six years in a Beijing prison.
'The Uighur people do not support acts that engender bloodshed'.
In one of the deadliest reported assaults in China in years, at least 16 policemen were killed Monday in Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang region, the Xinhua news agency said, raising security fears four days before the Beijing Olympics.
Two attackers, aged 28 and 33, were arrested immediately, according to the news agency, which identified the men as members of the Muslim ethnic Uighur group.
Police in Kashgar, about 4,000 kilometres from Beijing, have imposed a security clampdown in the surrounding areas.
Kadeer's Uighur American Association said it was seeking independent accounts of the incident and urged the international community 'to view Chinese government accounts regarding Uighur terrorist acts with caution, as government authorities consistently fail to provide evidence to back up their claims'.
She urged the Chinese government 'to refrain from using this incident to crack down further upon peaceful Uighurs'.
The incident 'will only serve to increase suppression of the Uighur people and exacerbate tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese', she said.
Most of the population in Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan and central Asia, are Muslim Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whom bridle at what they say has been 60 years of repressive communist Chinese rule.
Ms Kadeer was jailed in 1999 for leaking 'state secrets' to a US congressional delegation visiting Xinjiang. She was released in March 2005 and went into exile in the United States. -- AFP
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