Militants say 2 hostages are ‘for sale’
Islamic State’s claim about the pair points up international angle to issue of domestic terrorism in China.
BEIJING — Islamic State’s claim that it is holding for ransom a Chinese national as well as a Norwegian has underscored the gradual emergence of Beijing’s long-running struggle with domestic terrorism as an international problem.
The Sunni Muslim extremist group posted pictures of the two hostages Wednesday on its online English-language propaganda magazine, Dabiq. The two men, wearing yellow jumpsuits, stare directly at the camera; below them, a large-font message reads “for sale.”
Islamic State identified the men as Fan Jinghui, 50, a “freelance consultant” from Beijing, and Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad, 48, from Oslo.
The site gave Fan’s “home address” — an apartment in far-west Beijing — and a contact number for payment details. It described the ransom as a “limited time offer.” It did not give the hostages’ location, the ransom amount or details about their capture.
“To whom it may concern of the Crusaders, pagans and their allies, as well as what are referred to as human ‘rights’ organizations, this prisoner was abandoned by his government, which did not do its utmost to purchase his freedom,” a caption beneath the photographs says.
Islamic State had not previously been known to demand a ransom from Beijing.
For years, authorities have been battling a low-level insurgency in China’s far north-western region of Xinjiang, a vast sweep of deserts, mountains and scattered cities that is home to a plurality of ethnic Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking group. The region is frequently racked by riots, sieges on police stations and checkpoints, and bombings in public places.
Beijing has placed blame for the attacks on “separatists” and a shadowy organization called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, while Uighur groups abroad say the violence probably is motivated by despair over China’s religious and cultural constraints.
Experts say Uighurs are increasingly fleeing Xinjiang. Although many are simply seeking better lives abroad, others have been joining militant groups in the Middle East, raising concern that China’s terrorism problem is spreading beyond the country’s borders.
“China faces a long-term strategic threat from terrorism,” said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“Although the burden of international terrorism has now shifted from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Syria and Iraq,” he said, “China still faces a sustained threat, because several hundred Chinese — several hundred Uighurs — have traveled [to these areas], they have received training in terrorism, and they have joined” militant groups such as Islamic State and Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.
Uighurs, who are often denied passports by Chinese authorities, are increasingly leaving the country via human smuggling routes through the southern provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi into Southeast Asia.
This month, Thai authorities said several Chinese citizens from Xinjiang may have been behind a bombing at a Bangkok shrine in August that killed 20 people, including mainland Chinese and Hong Kong tourists.
Thai authorities detained one Uighur suspect, 25-year-old Yusufu Mieraili, in late August. According to the Bangkok Post, Mieraili confessed to delivering a bomb in a backpack to a man in a yellow shirt seen on closed-circuit TV near the shrine minutes before the explosion. He told investigators that 10 to 12 people were involved in the bombing, according to the newspaper.
The Thai government forcibly repatriated more than 100 asylum-seeking Uighurs to China in July, and officials suspect that the bombing may have been intended as retaliation.
Yang Shu, a terrorism expert at Lanzhou University in central China, said that the Chinese government has never been known to pay ransom for kidnapped citizens, and that Islamic State’s announcement probably would not change Beijing’s policy.
“If you look at previous cases, there have been quite a few Chinese people who were kidnapped in Afghanistan,” he said. “Some were rescued; the Chinese government secured their release through negotiations with local tribal leaders.”
Chinese business records show that a man with the same name as Islamic State’s purported hostage, Fan Jinghui, registered an advertising company in 2002 at the “home address” posted by the militant group.
Soon after Islamic State released the photos, reporters for several Chinese-language media organizations visited the address but found no occupants.
According to a Wednesday afternoon report in the Paper, a Shanghai-based news website, a man named Fan Jinghui, who also matched the hostage’s age and career path, appeared on a radio show, “One Hour at Lunchtime,” in 2001. The show’s theme involved young Chinese who choose to buck conventional 9-to-5 jobs for riskier ventures.
Fan, a freelancer in the advertising industry, said he taught high school for six years after graduating from college, then worked as a personal assistant to a producer at CCTV, the state broadcaster.
China’s Foreign Ministry could not be immediately reached for comment.