China plane crew rewarded for foiling attackers

BEIJING (Reuters) - China Southern Airlines has given a 400,000 yuan ($56,700) cash reward to staff for foiling a "terrorist" attack on a domestic flight earlier this month.

Chinese officials said internationally-backed separatists seeking an independent Xinjiang, the largely Muslim region in the northwest, were behind the failed March 7 attack.

The plane cut short its journey from Xinjiang to Beijing and landed in the northwestern city of Lanzhou.

China's aviation regulator, the General Administration of Civil Aviation (CAAC), said the crew had successfully foiled an attack of "malicious political intentions ... organized by internationally backed terrorists," in a report posted on its Web site (www.caac.gov.cn) on Tuesday.

Officials have not provided a detailed account of the incident. But sources later told Reuters that the chief suspects -- a man and a woman -- boarded the flight carrying Pakistani passports and drink cans that contained flammable liquids.

The woman, who had been born in Xinjiang but spent many years in Pakistan, failed to light the liquid in the plane toilet, and aroused the suspicion of crew and other passengers when she came out of the toilet to pick up the second can, one source said.

Xinjiang is home to 8 million Muslim Uighurs, many of whom resent the growing presence and economic grip of the Han ethnic majority. The oil-rich region borders Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Exiled Uighurs campaigning for an independent country have said China concocted the plane incident to justify heavy controls on Uighurs.

Xinjiang officials said the suspects had confessed to planning an attack. An aviation source last week told Reuters that a third suspect, a Pakistani, an apparent mastermind of the plan, was still at large.

The region's Communist Party Secretary Wang Lequan told officials to be on guard against "separatist" threats, Xinjiang's official news Web site (www.tianshannet.com) reported on Wednesday.

A senior Chinese official said recently that extremist Uighurs -- a Turkic people who share linguistic and cultural bonds with central Asia -- were plotting attacks on the Beijing Olympics.

China's ethnic tensions have come into focus in the wake of rioting in Tibetan areas following several days of peaceful protest in the regional capital Lhasa earlier this month.

(Reporting by Ian Ransom and Chris Buckley; Editing by Ken Wills and Sanjeev Miglani)