As China tells it, police burst into the Happiness Garden apartments in Urumqi in a deadly raid that saved the Beijing Olympics from a terrorist attack.
But that’s news to residents of the quiet middle-class compound in the Xinjiang region.
“No, no, no. There was nothing like that. That’s nonsense,” said a local resident, a member of the Muslim ethnic Uighur minority, when asked about the dramatic official version of the Jan. 27 raid.
The man was one of more than a dozen residents to question Chinese reports that Beijing said proved a terror threat in vast, heavily Muslim Xinjiang.
According to the official accounts that emerged last month, police raided a fourth-floor flat where “terrorists” were holed up.
In an ensuing clash described by state-controlled press and Xinjiang’s top Chinese Communist Party official Wang Lequan (王樂泉), militants threw grenades at police, injuring seven officers.
Eventually, two militants were killed and another 15 captured.
Weapons, explosives and militant Islamic literature were allegedly seized in the raid, which made world headlines for its implications on Olympic security.
Strangely, however, it went largely unnoticed at Happiness Garden, whose apartments are so tightly packed it would be difficult to keep anything from the neighbors.
The Uighur resident said he watched a van pull up, from which several men in plain clothes emerged, later escorting two people from the building into the van.
There was no gunfire or explosions, he said.
His account was backed by at least one other resident, an ethnic Han Chinese woman. More than a dozen neighbors who were eager to discuss the case said they heard and saw nothing.
“It’s very quiet here. Everybody would have heard something like that,” the Chinese woman said.
China has released only bare details of the raid — and of separate allegations of a failed attempt by a Uighur woman to blow up a Chinese airliner flying from Urumqi to Beijing on March 7.
Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer last month called both plots fabrications.
“The real goal of the Chinese government is to organize a terrorist attack so that it can increase its crackdown on the Uighur people,” said Kadeer, 61, the head of the Uyghur American Association, now in the US after serving a jail term in China.
Uighurs, a central Asian, Turkic language-speaking people, have long bridled under nearly six decades of Chinese rule.
Nicolas Bequelin, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch, said he doubted Xinjiang authorities would completely fabricate a terror cell, but added there was pressure from Beijing for local results on terrorism with the August Olympics approaching.
“Certainly the government is keen to emphasize the terror risk in Xinjiang and paint everything with the same brush. Criminal activity is often crudely conflated with terrorism,” he said. “China has muddied the waters on this so much that it is impossible to know the truth.”
Also See: EDITORIAL:Beijing’s other crackdowns
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