From The Times of India:
In a major blow to Pakistan’s counter-terrorism credentials, China has for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of terrorist camps within the territory of its “all-weather” ally.
It said that some East Turkistan separatists, who have been fighting for decades to make oil-rich northwest China’s Xinjiang province an independent state, received training at the terrorist camps in Pakistan.
The damning confirmation came in a court document in the trial of 37-year-old Huseyin Celil, a China-born Uygur-Canadian, who was on Thursday sentenced to life imprisonment by a Chinese court in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, for “taking part in terrorist activities and plotting to split the country.”
According to the court documents, Celil joined the East Turkistan Liberation Organisation (ETLO), a listed terrorist group active in central Asia, in November 1997 and was appointed as a senior instructor in Kyrgyzstan. [Full Text]
