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Chinese terrorist killed by Pakistan Army

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Dec. 25. China has announced that its most wanted terrorist, Hasan Mahsum, had been killed in an international anti-terror operation at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on October 2.

Confirming this development, apparently after a process of verification that might account for the delay in the announcement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said in Beijing on Wednesday that Hasan Mahsum was killed by the Pakistan Army. Though he did not spell out the nature and scope of China's role in the anti-terror raid, he characterised it as a `joint' operation.

It is not clear, however, whether the raid took place in the general area of the borders of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan or just on the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The slain person figured at the top of a list of 11 identified terrorists that Beijing released on December 15, even as it sought international support to tame four terrorist organisations, which were linked to the so-called "East Turkistan'' separatist movement in China's Xinjiang province. Beijing said at the time that all the four anti-China groups were based outside the country. The latest disclosure does not negate Beijing's claim that the "East Turkistan'' terrorists operate from outside China. It is a measure of the sensitivity of the case that China sought international cooperation for the extradition of Hasan Mahsum, among others, at a time when he had already been "shot dead''.

Mr. Liu hailed the level of international cooperation that marked the operation. China would sustain its anti-terror cooperation with the other members of the international community, he underlined.

The Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister, Lu Xinhua, held talks with the Afghan Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, in Kabul earlier this week. China described Hasan Mahsum as the ring-leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which was recently characterised by both the U.S. and the United Nations as an international terrorist organisation.

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