Olympics: China silent on details of latest terror cell report

China refused Friday to give details of the latest terrorist plot it said targetted the Olympics, continuing a pattern of secrecy that has fuelled doubts about its claims of a Games terror threat.

The state-run Xinhua news agency on Thursday quoted a Shanghai Olympic official saying police there had cracked a terrorist cell planning to attack an Olympic football venue in the Chinese financial hub.

The report came as China ramps up security ahead of the Summer Games, set to begin on August 8 in Beijing and co-host cities including Shanghai, amid what the government has described as an unprecedented terror threat.

No further information can be released for now, an official in the Shanghai police department's press office told AFP Friday.

The Chinese foreign ministry declined to comment and a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organisers said he had no information.

Chinese authorities have repeatedly warned that "terrorists" from China's restive Muslim Xinjiang region in the northwest are trying to launch attacks on the Games, and said previously that at least a dozen plots had been thwarted there.

In the latest reported plot, Shanghai's Olympic security chief Chen Jiulong told Xinhua that police had discovered "international terrorist organisations" were planning to attack a Shanghai Olympic football venue during the Games.

"We have staged raids and cracked a group of terrorists," he was quoted as saying.

No other details, including when the plot was cracked, were released.

Shanghai is set to host 12 football matches during next month's Games.

Critics say China's communist rulers are exaggerating the threat to clamp down on any form of protest during the Olympics.

Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher and Xinjiang expert with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, was sceptical about the latest reported plot, saying China had a history of irresponsibly making terror charges to justify tight control.

"It has become truly impossible to assess whether claims about particular plots have any merit," he told AFP.

"This is troubling because it is not a responsible attitude by an Olympic host," added Bequelin, who said the high number of reported terror cells raised eyebrows.

No evidence and few details have been given in the other cases surrounding Xinjiang, which allegedly included plots to attack or kidnap Olympic visitors from abroad.

In one of the previous plots, authorities said a January raid in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, broke up a cell planning Olympic attacks.

The raid on the so-called hide-out in an apartment block saw police throw hand-grenades, and the incident left two militants dead and seven policemen injured, according to the official account.

However, an AFP reporter later interviewed more than a dozen residents of the apartment complex who said no such violent raid took place. Authorities refused to speak to AFP about that incident.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based counter-terrorism expect, said China's secrecy was understandable because they did not want to compromise ongoing investigations by releasing too much detail.

Nevertheless Gunaratna, who said he had previously worked as a consultant with the Chinese government on terrorism, added that China could do more to dispel doubts about its claims.

"This is a huge learning experience for China and I believe they will devise more sophisticated ways of keeping the public informed in future," he said.