Beijing:
Shedding their differences, China and the US are coordinating to weed out extremist materials on the internet even as Beijing continues to battle violence in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region where the al-Qaeda backed militant groups have been active in the recent years.
Counter-terrorism work between China and the US has helped authorities in tracking down and deleting a number of violent, extremist propaganda video and audio programmes stored on the US servers, a senior official from the Ministry of Public Security said here.
“We have agreed on enhancing judicial cooperation on fighting terrorism, especially cracking down on violent and terrorist audio and video files released online in the US,” Yang Shaowen, deputy director of the ministry’s International Cooperation Bureau was quoted by the state-run China Daily today.
The situation has worsened across the country this year as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al-Qaeda backed outfit well entrenched in Xinjiang, home of Uygur Muslims, released audio and video files promoting terrorism on overseas websites, the State Internet Information Office said.
The files include knife attacks at Kunming railway station in which 29 people were killed in March this year and bomb attack that killed 43 in May in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Yang said.
In addition, due to the spread of online religious extremism, many young extremists in Xinjiang have illegally crossed China’s borders to countries such as Syria and Iraq to join the dreaded terrorist outfit Islamic State that has occupied swatches of land in the two countries and declared an Islamic Caliphate in the region in June.
“After receiving special armed training, some terrorist suspects return to China to plan more brutal terrorist activities at home,” Yang said, adding “many religious extremists in Xinjiang watched violent and terrorist videos, and listened to audio materials on the Internet, before they conducted brutal terror attacks”.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials said 175 people were killed in Xinjiang since the counter-terrorism crackdown on militants started six months ago.
A six-month review report published by Xinjiang provincial government this week stated that 334 people had been detained and 294 had been prosecuted for sharing online terrorism material.
