Islamic terrorists threaten Olympics in video, says US monitoring group

A US monitoring organization says a new video by Uighur extremists in western China threatens credible terrorist attacks on the Olympic Games, set to start Friday in Beijing. The warning comes just days after a deadly attack, believed to have been launched by Uighur terrorists, that left 16 Chinese police dead.

The New York Times reports that the IntelCenter, a US group monitoring terrorist posts online, said the video, released by a group calling itself the "Turkistan Islamic Party" (TIP), opens with a shot of a burning Olympics logo and an explosion superimposed over an Olympic site.

According to IntelCenter's description, a man holding an assault rifle, who identifies himself as Abdullah Mansour, says in the Uighur language: "We, members of the Turkestan Islamic Party, have declared war against China. We oppose China's occupation of our homeland of East Turkestan, which is a part of the Islamic world."

He warns Muslims not to go to the Games and not to let their children go. "We do not want to see any Muslim brothers and sisters who believe in Allah and his Holy Prophet Muhammad, who believe in the next life and the day of judgment, get hurt by our fire targeted at China," he says.

Bloomberg reports that IntelCenter said the video, which is dated Aug. 1, specifically warns Muslims to avoid taking buses, trains, and planes with China's predominant Han ethnic group. Bloomberg adds that the TIP released a similar video on July 23.

News of the video comes just days after a group of extremists killed 16 Chinese police in an attack in the western city of Kashgar. During the attack Monday, two men drove a truck into the police, who were jogging, and threw explosives into a nearby police barracks. The attackers are suspected to be members of the Uighur community, western China's Islamic minority. The Uighurs, concentrated in Xinjiang Province, are generally unhappy with growing dominance of Han Chinese in Uighur areas and Beijing's restrictions on Uighur religious and social practices.

Italy's AKI reports that there may have been an attack Friday as well, this time in the city of Ili in northwest Xinjiang. AKI writes that, according to Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera, a large explosion killed nine people, though it was unclear whether the explosion was intentional or accidental. AKI later reported that Chinese officials denied that an explosion had occurred.

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