For What Its Worth
In Taiwan, the head of national intelligence said a telephone call had been received on March 1 suggesting that an extremist Muslim group from China’s ethnic Uighur minority would mount a terrorist attack on Beijing International Airport – but added he did not believe the call was linked to the vanished airliner.
Police told local media the caller had rung from the southern Chinese city of Guangdong. He had spoken first in French, claiming to be an anti-terrorism official from that country, and then switched to the southern Chinese dialect of Cantonese. But Tsai De-sheng, the head of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, told state media he did not believe the warning was “highly correlated” with the vanished airliner.
Similarly, a Chinese Internet activist and journalist based in New York said he had received an email claiming the plane had been attacked in protests at Chinese “oppression and persecution” of its Uighur minority. The email, sent from an untraceable hushmail account, said the attack was also a personal act of revenge against the Malaysian government, which has “cruelly persecuted me before.”
Wen Yunchao said he had given the email to U.S. authorities, but had received an avalanche of attacks by email and Twitter for releasing it to the media.
In February, Human Rights Watch criticized Malaysia for repatriating to China six Uighur refugees seeking asylum there, saying it had put the men’s lives in danger; Malaysia also sent back 11 Uighurs in 2011.
Earlier this month, knife-wielding assailants killed 29 people at a railway station in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in the country’s history. The Chinese government said the perpetrators were separatist Uighurs from the western province of Xinjiang.
Nevertheless, to move from knife attacks to international terrorism and downing airliners would be a massive leap for Uighur extremists, who are not thought to have strong links to the global jihadist movement.
Debris may be from missing Malaysia Airlines flight - The Washington Post