China Blames Pakistan Trained Muslim Extremists for Attacks

Now it isn’t only the United States that is angry at Pakistan for terrorists trained there that go elsewhere and go on the attack. Now China is as well:

China pointed a finger at Pakistan, one of its closest foreign partners, as it blamed one of two deadly attacks over the weekend in the northwestern Xinjiang region on Muslim extremists trained across the Pakistani border.?

Police also “executed on the spot” two more suspected attackers in the city of Kashgar, according to a local government statement, while paramilitary police with shotguns and automatic weapons patrolled the streets to prevent further unrest.

Local authorities said 20 people were killed in all in the attacks by knife-wielding members of the Uighur ethnic minority on Saturday and Sunday in the second week of violence to rock Xinjiang.?

The city government hasn’t said whom it blames for the attack on Saturday, when it says that two Uighur men hijacked a truck near a popular night market, plowed it into a crowd, then leapt out and stabbed eight people to death. The crowd killed one of the attackers.

But it said Monday that an “initial probe” had shown that leaders of Sunday’s attack on a restaurant, in which 11 people died, had received explosives and firearms training in Pakistan-based camps of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, also known as ETIM.

China has long accused Uighur groups waging a sporadic, sometimes violent, campaign for independence of being part of ETIM, which it says has links to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and has sent people to train and fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But China rarely points a finger so directly and publicly at Pakistan, suggesting to some analysts that Beijing is either unhappy with Islamabad’s counterterrorism efforts or anxious to portray the recent violence as emanating from abroad.

The Wall Street journal piece points out that Pakistan has been trying to point to China as its new best bud as relations with the United States get frostier and frostier. This isn’t the way to cultivate a relationship with a best bud..