A combined grenade and knife attack killed 16 people in Kashgar, a remote city near China's far north-western border with Pakistan. Residents tell foreign visitors about their unhappiness with the rules from Beijing. Still their issues are mostly local as the city was flooded with police officers who stop them from creating any kind of chaos. Terrorism however is a constant threat, particularly from Muslim separatist groups in the Xinjiang region of western China.

On Monday morning 16 policemen were killed and 6 others injured when attackers threw two grenades into a police station in the desert oasis town of Kashgar.

For years Chinese forces have battled a separatist movement among the Uighur people. They are a Muslim central-Asian race different from the majority Han Chinese (which account for 92 per cent of the population).

China says it eradicated more than a dozen terrorist networks which aimed at disrupting the Games, although this hasn’t been sustained by any evidence. On the other hand, the Uighur people feel that the 2008 Olympics is the perfect opportunity for them to be even more persecuted.

The capital of China is promised to be extremely secured for the Olympics. Chinese leaders say, these Olympics will be “safe.” And Beijing was transformed into a fortress indeed, with missiles prepared above the Olympic stadiums, surveillance cameras mounted on the sidewalks, and cars going in and out of the city are carefully inspected

Residents wearing red armbands patrol neighborhoods looking for suspicious faces.

“I believe that Beijing’s Olympics are now facing real threats from terrorist attacks,” said Li Wei, a counterterrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Therefore these measures no longer seem out of the ordinary.