Terror groups using Internet as a tool: China

Amid increasing militant attacks in its restive Xinjiang province, China today said terror groups are using the Internet to recruit people, raise funds and plan assaults.

Calling audio and video materials that promote terrorism a "cancer" of the Internet, China's State Internet Information Office (SIIO) said here today that groups have sought to "spread terrorism and violent beliefs and teach terrorist skills online."

Terrorist forces have "turned the Internet into a principal tool for their operations," SIIO spokesman Jiang Jun said.

Such actions must be struck down decisively, he was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

China launched a campaign on Friday to rid the Internet of audio and video materials that promote terrorism and violence.

The move is aimed at safeguarding social stability in the northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and long-term peace, the SIIO said.

China blames East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for the recurring violent attacks in Xinjiang where the native Uygur population is restive over increasing settlements of Han from other provinces.

In a crackdown on terrorism, security forces have broken up 32 "terror groups", detained 380 "suspects" and sentenced 315 others in the first month of the year-long campaign to deal with increasing terror attacks.

There have been several blasts and knife attacks in China recently.

Thirteen assailants were shot dead on Sunday by Chinese police after they rammed their explosive-laden vehicle into a police station in a suicide attack that injured three officers in the restive Xinjiang province.

At least 39 people were killed and 94 others injured in May in China's bloodiest terror attack at a busy market in Urumqi, provincial capital of the Xinjiang province, when militants rammed two explosive-laden vehicles into a crowd and set off over a dozen blasts.

This attack is regarded as the worst violence in the country as militants, earlier largely confined to knife attacks, used multiple explosives besides triggering car bombs.

In April, Xinjiang was the scene of a railway station attack which killed three and injured 79 people.

That attack was blamed on radical religious extremists seeking to take control of the region.

While in another major incident in March, dubbed by state media as China's "9/11", knife-wielding attackers stabbed 29 people to death and injured 143 at another railway station in southwestern Kunming city.