BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have arrested nine Muslims for preaching illegally in the northwestern region of Xinjiang as part of a broad clampdown on separatists among the Uighur ethnic minority group there.
A police officer in Xinjiang's Bayingolin Mongol Prefecture, 500 km (310 miles) south of the capital Urumqi, told Reuters on Friday the nine were arrested as part of a stepped up campaign against "separatists, terrorists and religious extremists".
He said the campaign in the prefecture, on the edge of the Taklimakan desert, started on December 10 and was scheduled to run until the end of February.
"Initial investigations show that these people were involved in a¦ illegal preaching more than 20 times this year," the police officer said.
The nine translated the Koran into local languages and used it to preach the separatist cause, he said.
Human rights and religious groups say the clampdown has already swept up dozens of Muslims in other parts of Xinjiang.
The start of the Xinjiang crackdown coincided with a warning by Chinese President Jiang Zemin against using religion to oppose the leadership of the ruling Communist Party.
China blames Uighur separatists for a string of violent attacks over the past decade and says they have designs to pursue an independent state called East Turkestan in Xinjiang.
A spokesman from the Swedish-based East Turkestan Information Centre told Reuters that dozens of Muslim clerics and students had been arrested in Xinjiang's northwestern Bortala prefecture and the western city of Hotan.
Police in those areas declined to comment.
STEPPED UP
China's leaders are beefing up Communist Party controls in a bid to ensure stability ahead of a critical congress next year at which a number of leaders, including Jiang, are due to step down from their party posts and hand power to a younger generation.
At a national conference on religion on December 10-12, Jiang urged that religious work be conducted according to the law. China guarantees freedom of religion in its constitution but allows worship only through state-controlled religious bodies.
"Religions should never be allowed to be used for opposing the Party leadership and socialism system, destroying national reunification and ethnic unity, as well as harming national interests," state media quoted Jiang as saying.
At the same time, Chinese state media have intensified a campaign against the banned Falun Gong spiritual group through repeated coverage highlighting a murder in Beijing that officials said was carried out by a practitioner.
The group's U.S.-based information centre has denied the reports, saying its teachings prohibit killing and suicide.
"This latest media blitz comes just days after the conclusion of a national conference on religion in China," the information centre said in a statement.
Falun Gong, branded an "evil cult" and banned in 1999, practices a mixture of Taoism and Buddhism and traditional Chinese physical exercises.
The group says more than 1,600 followers have died as a result of abuse in police custody or detention centres.
Chinese authorities have acknowledged several deaths of Falun Gong members in custody, but say most resulted from suicide or illness. They blame the group for the deaths of at least 1,800 people through suicide or the refusal to take medical treatment.