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Chinese authorities have executed the leader of an Islamic separatist group accused of planning and committing 'terrorist' attacks in the restive region of Xinjiang, a court official and state media said on Friday.
The Intermediate People's Court of Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture recently handed the sentence to Alerken Abula, leader of the 113 member East Turkestan Islamic party of Allah, said a report in the People's Court Daily.
He has been executed already and more than 10 members of his group have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from two years to life, the court official told Reuters.
The members were convicted for 'conducting terrorist activities in various cities and areas in the aim of establishing an Islamic regime on native soil', the newspaper said.
The party had targeted 32 Chinese government officials, Communist party members and 'patriotic' religious figures for attack, it said. It was unclear from the article whether those planned attacks had actually been carried out.
The court official declined to provide more details.
China forbids religious worship outside 'patriotic' churches and mosques approved and supervised by the government.
Ethnic Uighur militants in the northwestern region of Xinjiang have been agitating for decades to break from China and re-establish East Turkestan, the independent homeland that existed in the 1940s before Beijing regained control of the region following the communist revolution in 1949.
To assimilate Xinjiang, then Chinese leader Mao Zedong instituted a massive programme of migration to the region. Ethnic Chinese now comprise nearly half of its 17 million people.
The separatist movement became increasingly violent in the late 1990s, with a series of bus bombings and a deadly riot in the border town of Yining in February 1997.
China appears to have curbed the violence through intense police surveillance and sweeps, that netted hundreds of suspected 'splittists'. Amnesty international says at least 190 ethnic Uighurs were executed between 1997 to 1999.
The People's Court Daily said Alerken Abula founded the East Turkestan Islamic Party of Allah, called the Islamic Opposition Party before its name was changed in late 1996, in October 1993.
Security officials began arresting members and obtaining criminal confessions in January 1997, it said.
They were convicted of buying arms and possession of 'illegal propaganda tools', including a printing press, it said.
Beijing has stepped up diplomatic pressure on its neighbours to help combat Islamic extremist activities inside and along the Xinjiang border, including the delivery, last week, of 40 tonnes of military supplies to Kyrgyzstan.
Xinjiang shares a 5,400 km border
with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan
and Kashmir.
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