China on Olympic terror alert after border attack

The Guardian online reported sixteen policemen were killed and 16 injured in a raid on a paramilitary border police headquarters, in the north-western Xinjiang region.

Two men used a dumper truck to run down a group of police outside their station in the city of Kashgar, before knifing them and exploding home-made grenades, state news agency Xinhua reported.

After the attack, Olympic organisers indicated precautions were in place to ensure the safe running of the games.

"We are prepared to deal with any kind of security threat and we are confident we will have a safe and peaceful Olympic games," said Sun Weide, an official with the Beijing organising committee.

A security force of 100,000 is on standby in Beijing, 2,500 miles from Kashgar. Security measures in the capital have included stationing anti-aircraft missiles near the "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium.

Yesterday's attack followed repeated claims from authorities that Uighur separatists from Xinjiang were targeting the games. Details of the incident could not be independently verified, although witnesses reported hearing blasts and seeing the aftermath of an explosion.

At the scene outside the Yiquan hotel yesterday, the only sign of what had happened was three holes in the ground where trees had been recently uprooted, and some broken windows at the travel agents next door.

A visiting British couple staying in a nearby hotel said they heard an explosion. "I was having breakfast at about 8am when I heard two or three loud bangs. They sounded like a car backfiring so I didn't pay much attention, until later when I heard some police had been killed," said a tourist, Sam Gunter.

He went to the police station in the afternoon where he saw 13 large coffin-like refrigerators, but he was ushered away.

Late last night there was a strong security presence at the scene, with several police cars and a group of eight paramilitaries, but journalists were relatively free to move around and report.

The Chinese authorities have identified the assailants, now in custody, as Uighur men aged 28 and 33. The official media said local police suspected the attack was a terrorist act and added that the public security bureau had suspected the region's East Turkestan Islamic Movement of plotting an attack in the run-up to the games, which begin on Friday.

"This is the most serious incident recorded in years," said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch. "Ahead of the Olympics, it is a very powerful symbolic attack because security in Xinjiang is at an all-time high."

Turkic-speaking Uighur Muslims make up about 8 million of the 19 million population in Xinjiang, a mineral-rich region more than three times the size of France. Many resent controls on religion, and Han Chinese immigration.