Did China stage those attempted terrorist attacks?

A couple days ago, we told you about a report from Chinese officials that an attempted terrorist attack forced a plane to make an emergency landing in the western Chinese city of Lanzhou. Chinese investigators had almost no details about the incident, but they were quick to call it the work of terrorists and seemed to imply that an Uyghur separatist group was responsible.

Now, questions are being raised about the veracity of the Chinese officials’ claim. Steven Tsang, an Oxford professor and expert on China, wonders why the supposedly almost-hijacked flight was allowed to continue to Beijing after landing in Lanzhou. “There’s no way any anti-terrorism police would have released the plane and passengers to fly on without extensive interviews of the passengers, forensic examination of the plane and so on.”

According to Time Magazine: “Tsang also noted that it was particularly easy to blame a shadowy Islamic separatists movement in the build-up to the Beijing Olympics, possibly as a deterrent to those or any other groups who might want to disrupt the Games.”

The exiled leader of the Uyghur people also claims that China fabricated the attacks, saying, “The real goal of the Chinese government is to organize a terrorist attack so that it can increase its crackdown on the Uighur people.”

That doesn’t sound like the Olympic spirit to me.