Arrests
were made as suspects headed to Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to
reports
 |
| Passengers board a flight at Shanghai Pudong airport. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP |
Shanghai
police have detained 10 Turkish nationals for supplying fake passports to
terror suspects from China’s Xinjiang region, state media has reported.
The police
arrested an additional 11 Chinese nationals in November, according to the
state-run Global Times newspaper. Nine allegedly purchased falsified Turkish
passports for 60,000 yuan (£6,384) each and two helped facilitate the
transactions. Many of the accused are ethnic Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking
minority group.
Ethnic
violence in Xinjiang – a sprawling, sparsely populated region in China’s far
north-west – has killed at least 400 people over the past two years. Beijing
has blamed a number of attacks, which include market bombings, riots, sieges of
police and government offices, on religious extremism and the influence of
pernicious foreign groups. Uighur groups abroad frequently describe them as a
desperate stand against religious and cultural repression.
Police
apprehended the suspects at the Shanghai Pudong airport as they attempted to
leave China, some of them bound for Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according
to the newspaper. One of the suspects had “repeatedly broadcast audio and
visual materials to incite ethnic hatred and ethnic prejudice,” it said.
Michael
Clarke, a Xinjiang expert at Griffith University in Australia, said that if the
report is true, the arrests would mark an unprecedented case of China arresting
foreign nationals in connection with Xinjiang-related violence.
“Turkey,
for the Uighurs, has long been seen as a clear cultural connection,
linguistically and so forth,” he said. “I suppose there’s ideological sympathy
as well for the Uighurs from Turkey. But I haven’t seen evidence before that
Turkish nationals were travelling to China to support Uighurs within Xinjiang.
“One big
question is, how will this affect China’s relationship with Turkey itself? Over
the past decade there has been a strengthening of the relationship on a number
of levels: economic, diplomatic and security as well. If this emerges to be
correct – that Turkish individuals are involved in terrorist activities in
China– that would seem to be a fairly big issue in the bilateral relationship.”
Over the
past year, authorities in south-east Asia have arrested hundreds of Uighurs
travelling through the region on fake Turkish passports. In March 2014, Thai
authorities detained more than 200 Uighurs at a human smuggling camp. Many of
them purported to be Turkish, and some claimed to seek political asylum. In
September, Indonesian police arrested four Uighurs, also on Turkish passports;
police said that they planned to meet an Indonesian jihadi with ties to Isis.
Details of the case remain murky. In October, Malaysian police detained 155
Uighurs crammed into two tiny apartments in Kuala Lumpur.
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