Homegrown threats top Olympics security worries: official

BEIJING (Reuters) - Homegrown threats top China's security worries for the Beijing Olympic Games, an official overseeing security said, warning that airborne threats to Games venues will be shot down if they come too close.

Tian Yixiang, head of the Beijing Olympic Games Security Protection Coordinating Group, said the top "terror" threats to the August Games come from Uighur militants campaigning for independence for Xinjiang in China's far northwest, from Tibetan independence groups, and from followers of the banned Falun Gong sect.

"The security situation facing the Beijing Olympic Games is stable overall, but there remain threats in the traditional and non-traditional security spheres," Tian told the official magazine Outlook Weekly.

"Terror attacks are the principal threat to Olympic Games Security," he said, according to the report, which was circulated on the Xinhua news agency's website (www.xinhuanet.com).

Tian, who has rarely given public comments on preparations for the Games, said a failed bomb attack on a plane in Xinjiang in March and anti-Chinese unrest across Tibet that same month, "amply showed that they are scheming to sabotage the Beijing Olympic Games".

The official comments bluntly underscored how, just over a month before the Games open on August 8, Beijing sees the main Games threat from long-term domestic worries, rather than international terrorist groups with no direct focus on Chinese policies.

Exiled Uighurs and groups campaigning for Tibetan self-determination have both repeatedly denounced as self-serving exaggeration China's claims that they form terrorist threats.

In talks last week with envoys of the Dalai Lama, Chinese officials said the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader should denounce "violent terror" and named the exiled Tibetan Youth Congress as a particular threat.

The Dalai Lama's envoys said they "categorically rejected" the Chinese claims that the Congress engaged in "violent terror".

Tian said the airspace around Games venues would be closely controlled and security forces would seek to warn off, force down or shoot down airborne attacks as they approached.

Chinese military forces have been readying for the Games since early 2005, and were still rigorously training, Tian said.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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