Muslim militants killed 16 armed police in Xinjiang earlier this week in a campaign to found an independent Uighur homeland. The region's governor, Nuer Baikeli, said the attack was aimed at the Olympic Games that open on Friday evening.

"With these special circumstances and the special background of the eve of the Beijing Olympic Games, hostile forces at home and abroad will surely act like cornered mad dogs and step up their terror and sabotage activities," said Nuer Baikeli, according to the Xinjiang Daily on Friday.

"Their plotting to create terror and disrupt the Olympics will come to nothing," he told a memorial service for the police killed in Kashgar, a heavily Uighur market city, on Monday. The report was carried by the China News Service (chinanews.com.cn).

China has called Uighur militants campaigning for a separate nation of East Turkestan a top threat to the Games. But the security chief of Beijing's Olympics organising body said on Thursday he was confident the country could ensure a safe Games.

Many of Xinjiang's 8 million largely Muslim Uighurs chafe at the strict controls on religion that China enforces and resent influxes of Han Chinese migrant workers and businesses. Uighurs make up slightly less than half of the region's people, and most of the rest are Han.

A few Uighurs have joined militant groups drawing inspiration, and some experts say money and training, from extremists in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Human rights critics say China's strict controls in the region only further estrange Uighurs. But the governor, himself a Uighur, vowed even tougher measures to come.

"A handful of ethnic separatists are bitter in defeat...and are striving all out to create incidents at the time of the Beijing Olympic Games and expand their influence."