FBI offers to assist China with Olympic security

BEIJING, June 13 (Reuters) The US Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday offered to help China with security at next year's Olympic Games, saying it posed a massive challenge for local authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of athletes, celebrities and state officials, as well as journalists and tourists, are expected to descend on the country next August for the Games.

''There are tremendous issues of security as to who is entering the country, what backgrounds they may have and whether they intend violence at the Olympic Games for any variety of reasons,'' Thomas Fuentes, the assistant director of the FBI's Office of International Operations, told reporters.

''This is a massive challenge for the authorities here in China to deal with. We're offering every possible assistance to them in terms of information sharing or other technical assistance.'' Fuentes was speaking in Beijing where he was attending a regular dialogue with Chinese counterparts to coordinate on law enforcement issues ranging from cybercrime to human smuggling.

China has made much of relying on its own security forces for next year's Olympics and believes it can deliver a secure Games for a fraction of the $1.8 billion that Athens paid in 2004.

Liu Shaowu, head of the security department at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG), said in April organisers had taken advice from the security chiefs of the last two Summer Games on how to keep the 2008 Olympics safe.

China has had few problems with terrorism in recent years, although police said in January that 18 people it described as terrorists had been killed and another 17 captured in a raid on a training camp in southern Xinjiang that it said was run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

AL QAEDA LINK? Fuentes said FBI agents were working with China to assess whether there was a terrorist threat in the predominantly Muslim northwest.

''We are looking at issues concerning the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the possible role they may be playing in terrorist activities,'' Fuentes told reporters.

China accuses the group of trying to set up an independent East Turkestan in Xinjiang, the oil-rich region that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries.

The region is home to about 8 million ethnic Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic people, many of whom resent the growing Han Chinese presence in the region and government controls on their religion and culture.

Fuentes said the FBI and Chinese officials were trying to assess ''the possible connection with al Qaeda and whether al Qaeda is attempting to use that group to expand its terrorist activities''.

He declined to say whether the threat from the group was growing.

''We're trying to assess how big of a threat it is and whether that threat will expand,'' he said. ''We do know that terrorism is expanding throughout the world, particularly al Qaeda and its affiliates are expanding worldwide.'' REUTERS BJR ND1830