The unrest occurred in China's Muslim-majority Xinjiang region last month, after Chinese authorities warned that "terrorists" based there were planning attacks on the Beijing Olympics and had tried to bomb a Beijing-bound plane.

In the latest incident, extremist forces tried to incite an uprising in a marketplace in Khotan city on March 23, according to a statement from the local government posted on its website this week.

It did not reveal how many people were involved in the protest, but said up to 100,000 people were in the market when the unrest occurred.

An exiled group representing people in Xinjiang said up to 1,000 people were involved in two protests there on March 23 and 24.

"A small number of elements... tried to incite splittism, create disturbances in the market place and even trick the masses into an uprising," the Khotan government statement said.

It said the people involved adhered to the "three evil forces," a Chinese expression that refers to separatism, religious extremism and terrorism.

"Our police immediately intervened to prevent this and are dealing with it in accordance with the law," added the statement.

Most of the population in Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan and central Asia, are Muslim Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whom say they have been subjected to 60 years of repressive communist Chinese rule.

Rights groups and Uighur exiles have alleged that China is trying to stoke fears about terror attacks in Xinjiang as an excuse to crack down on dissent and justify tight control there ahead of the Olympics in Beijing in August.

In the Khotan unrest, a Uighur exile group said people took to the streets to protest over a local businessman who died in police custody and against a ban on women wearing traditional head scarves.

"The Uighurs began protesting after the killing of Mutallip Hajim, who had died in police custody," Alim Seytoff, head of the US-based World Uighur Congress, told AFP.

"The women were also protesting the ban on head scarves."

The two protests included up to 1,000 demonstrators, he said, adding that as many as 600 had been detained.

Hajim, a wealthy jade trader and philanthropist, was taken into custody in Khotan in January, according to the US government-backed Radio Free Asia.

But his body was turned over to his family on March 3, with police instructing them to bury him immediately and inform no one of his death, it said.

Local police and the religious affairs bureau in Khotan, also known as Hetian, refused to comment on the protests or Hajim's case when contacted by AFP.

China initially raised the alarm over the alleged threat from Xinjiang on March 9 when it said a January raid on "terrorists" there had foiled a planned attack directed at the Olympics.

On the same day, it announced a 19-year-old Muslim woman had tried to bomb a Chinese Southern Airlines flight that had taken off from Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, and was on its way to Beijing.

The Khotan protests came as China was trying to contain unrest on a much larger scale in neighbouring Tibet, a Buddhist region whose population similarly claim widespread repression under Chinese rule.

China has blamed exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, as being behind the unrest in Tibet, claims he denies.

Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based China expert at Human Rights Watch, said it was worrying the Khotan government had publicly responded to the unrest there by immediately blaming "terrorists and extremist forces."

"The authorities are not making a distinction between protesters, rioters or the peaceful expression of political opinion, they are mixing this all up and painting it with the same brush," Bequelin said.

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