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China turns table on Pakistan, accuses it of training terrorists
BEIJING: China on Thursday took the wind out of the Pakistani sails by saying that East Turkistan terrorists operating on its soil were actually trained in special camps in neighbouring Pakistan.
The revelations came within hours of Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz leaving Beijing after raising the Kashmir issue and related dispute with India. Aziz had also successfully persuaded the Chinese leaders to offer a variety of economic goodies to Islamabad after promising to rein in the terrorists operating along the Sino-Pakistan border.
This is the first time that Beijing has taken on its long-standing friend and partner in fighting terrorism with the charge that Pakistani soil was actually being used for the purpose of training anti-China separatists in the border
province of Xinjiang.
India's lobbying with China on the issue of Pakistani involvement in terrorism and Shaukar Aziz's attempt to overuse the "separatism card" to extract economic benefits may have prompted the government to expose
Pakistan's counter-terrorism credentials, sources said.
The revelations are part of the government's case against Huseyin Celil, a China-born Uygur-Canadian, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The court charged him of "taking part in terrorist activities and plotting to split the country".
The 37-year old Celil has been accused of recruiting several people for East Turkistan Liberation Organisation and sending them to terrorist training camps on the Pamir plateau in Pakistan. Court papers indicate that Celil worked as a senior instructor in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan bases of Etlo, which is a separatist group actively functioning in the Muslim dominated province of Xinjiang since 1997. Etlo's objective is to secure an independent East Turkistan by putting together parts of China, Kyrgyzstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Official sources accused Celil of being involved with another terrorist organisation, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. He organized training of cadre and raised funds for ETIM, the official Xinhua news agency said today.
Celil was also in touch with ETIM's former head Hasan Mahsum, who was shot dead by the Pakistan army in 2003, the court papers said.
It now turns out that the Chinese government had known about camps in Pakistan for a long time but chose to publicly keep quite about it for diplomatic reasons. Last January, the Chinese police killed 18 "terrorists" and arrested 17 others on the Chinese side of the Pamir plateau, which extends to Pakistan. One Chinese police officer was killed and another wounded in the raid.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/China_accuses_Pak_of_training_terrorists/articleshow/1925630.cms
BEIJING: China on Thursday took the wind out of the Pakistani sails by saying that East Turkistan terrorists operating on its soil were actually trained in special camps in neighbouring Pakistan.
The revelations came within hours of Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz leaving Beijing after raising the Kashmir issue and related dispute with India. Aziz had also successfully persuaded the Chinese leaders to offer a variety of economic goodies to Islamabad after promising to rein in the terrorists operating along the Sino-Pakistan border.
This is the first time that Beijing has taken on its long-standing friend and partner in fighting terrorism with the charge that Pakistani soil was actually being used for the purpose of training anti-China separatists in the border
province of Xinjiang.
India's lobbying with China on the issue of Pakistani involvement in terrorism and Shaukar Aziz's attempt to overuse the "separatism card" to extract economic benefits may have prompted the government to expose
Pakistan's counter-terrorism credentials, sources said.
The revelations are part of the government's case against Huseyin Celil, a China-born Uygur-Canadian, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The court charged him of "taking part in terrorist activities and plotting to split the country".
The 37-year old Celil has been accused of recruiting several people for East Turkistan Liberation Organisation and sending them to terrorist training camps on the Pamir plateau in Pakistan. Court papers indicate that Celil worked as a senior instructor in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan bases of Etlo, which is a separatist group actively functioning in the Muslim dominated province of Xinjiang since 1997. Etlo's objective is to secure an independent East Turkistan by putting together parts of China, Kyrgyzstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Official sources accused Celil of being involved with another terrorist organisation, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. He organized training of cadre and raised funds for ETIM, the official Xinhua news agency said today.
Celil was also in touch with ETIM's former head Hasan Mahsum, who was shot dead by the Pakistan army in 2003, the court papers said.
It now turns out that the Chinese government had known about camps in Pakistan for a long time but chose to publicly keep quite about it for diplomatic reasons. Last January, the Chinese police killed 18 "terrorists" and arrested 17 others on the Chinese side of the Pamir plateau, which extends to Pakistan. One Chinese police officer was killed and another wounded in the raid.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/China_accuses_Pak_of_training_terrorists/articleshow/1925630.cms