Police foil plot to blow up shopping mall
Print Edition
A YOUNG man said to have been encouraged by the ETIM terrorist group to try to blow up a shopping mall in north China’s Shijiazhuang City has been caught by police, China Central Television reported yesterday.
Akbar, a man in his early 20s from northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, went overseas in 2013 and met a man named Aili, a member of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a UN-listed terrorist group, CCTV said.
To persuade him to wage jihad, or holy war, Aili told Akbar martyrs go to heaven, it said.
Acting on Aili’s orders, Akbar and another man went to Syria via Turkey to learn how to use guns and make explosives, it reported.
In an interview with CCTV at the detention house where he is being held, Akbar said that when he arrived in Syria, all his money, about 190 Turkish lira (US$72), was taken as fees to help him slip across the border.
He shared a tiny, shabby room with another six to seven people. They were given old clothes and fed on tinned beef, he said. After three months’ training, Aili told him to return to China to carry out jihad, Akbar told CCTV.
Early this year, he went to Hebei’s provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, but before he could carry out his plan, police had caught up with him, CCTV reported.
“In Syria, my life was hard. I lost freedom and I could only rely on others to live. Also, I didn’t have any friend in whom I could confide,” he told CCTV.
Akbar said young people like him should not believe everything they were shown in violent and terrorist videos and that they should not act on impulse.
On July 9, 109 illegal immigrants who had been on their way to Turkey, Syria or Iraq were repatriated from Thailand to China. Most were said to be Uygurs who had been radicalized by material released by ETIM and the World Uygur Congress.
Thirteen had fled China after being implicated in terrorist activities, while another two had escaped from detention, the public security ministry said.
Chinese police also found there were several Turkey-based gangs which organized and encouraged Uygurs to travel to Syria to join jihad.
Turkish diplomats in some Southeast Asian countries had facilitated the illegal movement of people, the ministry said.
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