BEIJING, July 9: Chinese police shot dead five members of a radical separatist group intent on waging “holy war”, state media reported on Wednesday, as top officials called for an all-out security push ahead of next month’s Beijing Olympics.

No hard evidence was offered to back up the claim, although a leading terrorism expert said such incidents underscore the significant threat Beijing faced from an Al Qaeda-linked radical group fighting for independence in the predominantly Muslim far-western Xinjiang region.

With the Olympics just weeks away, Chinese officials are ordering increasingly tough security measures, with a dual ring of hundreds of checkpoints due to go up around the city starting next week.

State media accounts of Tuesday’s raid in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, said two other members of the group were hospitalised with injuries and eight others detained.

The group, all members of Xinjiang’s indigenous Uighur ethnic group and including five women, brandished knives and swore to fight to the death after more than a dozen police officers surrounded their apartment, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

“The suspects confessed they had all received training on the launching of a ‘holy war’,” Xinhua said.—AP