BEIJING: China’s top security official has named an Islamic movement as “behind-the-scenes supporters” of this week’s fatal attack in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing’s first claim of an organised link to the incident.
“Its behind-the-scenes supporters was the terrorist group the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) based in Central and West Asia,” Meng Jianzhu said when asked about the Tiananmen incident during a visit to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, video posted online on Thursday showed.
A high-profile car crash on Monday killed two tourists and injured dozens at the popular site and symbolic heart of the Chinese state. The three people in the car — a man, his wife and his mother — all died in the crash, police say.
They said the vehicle had a licence plate from Xinjiang, the far western region where China’s mostly Muslim Uighur minority is concentrated, while the names released of the three people inside and five other detained suspects sounded Uighur.
ETIM is known as a militant Islamic separatist group that seeks an independent state in Xinjiang. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Friday called the group “the most immediate and realistic security threat in China”.
It and other organisations “have long been engaged in central, east and west Asia, and have colluded with other international terrorist organisations”, she said at a regular press briefing, without elaborating or confirming any ETIM tie to the attack.
The US and the UN classified ETIM as a terrorist organisation in 2002. AFP
