Syrian prime minister survives bomb attack

BEIRUT: Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halki survived a bomb attack on his convoy in Damascus on Monday, state media and activists said, as rebels struck in the heart of President Bashar al-Assad's capital.

Six people were killed in the blast, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, the latest in a series of rebel attacks on government targets including a December bombing which wounded Assad's interior minister.

Halki wields little power but the attack highlighted the rebels' growing ability to target symbols of Assad's authority in a civil war which has cost more than 70,000 lives, according to the United Nations.

Assad picked Halki in August to replace Riyadh Hijab, who defected and escaped to neighbouring Jordan just weeks after a Damascus bombing which killed four of the president's top security advisers.

In comments released by the state news agency SANA but not shown on television, Halki was quoted as condemning the attack as a sign of "bankruptcy and failure of the terrorist groups", a reference to the rebels battling to overthrow Assad.

The blast shook the Mezze district soon after 9 a.m. (0600 GMT) and sent thick black smoke into the sky. The Observatory said one man accompanying Halki was killed as well as five passers-by.

State television showed firemen hosing down the charred and mangled remains of a car. Close by was a large white bus, its windows blown out and its seats gutted by fire. Glass and debris were scattered across several lanes of a main road.

"The terrorist explosion in al-Mezze was an attempt to target the convoy of the prime minister. Doctor Wael al-Halki is well and not hurt at all," state television said.

It later broadcast footage of Halki, who appeared composed and unruffled, chairing what it said was an economic committee.

Mezze is part of a shrinking "Square of Security" in central Damascus, where many government and military institutions are based and where senior Syrian officials live.

Sheltered for nearly two years from the bloodshed and destruction ravaging much of the rest of Syria, it has been slowly sucked into violence as rebel forces based to the east of the capital launch mortar attacks and carry out bombings in the centre.

Chemical weapons

Assad has lost control of large areas of northern and eastern Syria, faces a growing challenge in the southern province of Deraa, and is battling rebels in many cities.

But his forces have been waging powerful ground offensives, backed by artillery and air strikes, against rebel-held territory around the capital and near the central city of Homs which links Damascus to the heartland of Assad's minority Alawite sect in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean.

As part of that counter-offensive, Assad's forces probably used chemical weapons, the United States said last week.

Despite congressional pressure on President Barack Obama to do more to help the rebels, he has made clear he is in no rush to intervene on the basis of evidence he said was preliminary.

Russia, which has criticised Western and Gulf Arab support for the anti-Assad fighters, said that attempts by Western countries to expand a UN inquiry into chemical weapons in Syria amounted to a pretext to intervene in the civil war.

"There is not always a basis for the allegations (of the use of chemical weapons)," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference on Monday after meeting the head of the African Union Commission.

"There are probably governments and a number of external players who believe that it is fine to use any means to overthrow the Syrian regime. But the theme of the use of weapons of mass destruction is too serious and we shouldn't joke about it. To take advantage of it (to advance) geopolitical goals is not acceptable."

The United Nations said in February that around 70,000 people had been killed in Syria's conflict. Since then activists have reported daily death tolls of between 100 and 200.

Five million people have fled their homes, including 1.4 million refugees in nearby countries, and war losses are estimated at many tens of billions of dollars.

The Beirut-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia estimates that 400,000 houses have been completely destroyed, 300,000 partially destroyed and a further half million have suffered some kind of structural damage.

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40 injured, 4 dead in Prague's powerful blast

PRAGUE: A powerful blast ripped through a multi-storey building in Prague's historic centre on Monday, leaving about 40 people injured and possibly up to four dead trapped in the rubble, rescuers said.

The force of the explosion, which police said was believed to have been caused by a gas leak, blew out windows in nearby streets, and shook buildings across the Vltava river in the Czech capital.

Police have sealed off the popular tourist area and evacuated around 220 people from several nearby buildings, Prague police spokesman Tomas Hulan said.

Emergency services chief Zdenek Schwarz told the novinky.cz news website that three or four dead people may be buried in the rubble

of the damaged building, which is near Prague's historic National Theatre.

"The gas company workers haven't allowed rescuers in the building where the blast occurred, but (detection) dogs have marked the place a few times so we suppose there might be three or four dead people there," he said.

An AFP photographer at the scene saw dozens of people with cuts, likely sustained by shattered glass from windows along the debris-covered Divadelni Street. Injured victims were treated on the spot for cuts, some with blood streaming down their faces and bandages on their heads and many of them in shock.

Prague emergency service spokeswoman Jirina Ernestova told AFP that about 40 people had been taken to hospital for treatment.

Schwarz also told Czech TV that four people had suffered serious injuries, while other Czech media said up to 55 may have been hurt.

"A gas blast seems to be the most likely cause. The explosion was rather massive and damaged windows in several streets," Hulan told the television station, adding that several hundred Prague police officers were in action.

Czech media said the blast moved the wall of the building, a former block of flats now used as office space, by five centimetres (two inches) and quoted witnesses as saying they could smell gas in the street.

Prime Minister Petr Necas said in a statement that he was "deeply affected by the tragedy".

The buildings in the area were mostly built in the 19th century, including the ornate National Theatre, whose adjacent modern section was damaged by the blast.

Students and teachers from two nearby universities panicked and ran out when the blast shook their buildings, fearing a terrorist attack, an unnamed student told Czech TV.

"Blast in Divadelni (street), many injured. Windows broken at journalism faculty," Milos Cermak, a Czech journalist who was lecturing in an adjacent university building at the time, wrote on Twitter.

"Police say gas still leaking. Helicopter above us. Classes cancelled for rest of week," he added.

Cermak described the explosion as "a terrible blast."

"We don't know what happened. The firefighters helped some students covered in blood out of the building," Tomas, a student at the faculty, told the website of the Lidove noviny broadsheet.

The Czech capital welcomed more than 5.4 million tourists last year.

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Hopes fade for Bangladesh survivors

DHAKA: Rescue officials in Bangladesh said on Monday they were unlikely to find more survivors in the rubble of a factory building that collapsed last week burying hundreds of garment workers in the country's worst industrial accident.

Heavy cranes were being used to lift huge concrete blocks from the wreckage of Rana Plaza, where 381 people are now confirmed to have been killed according to the latest official toll. The building housed factories making clothes for western brands.

Hundreds more of the mostly female workers who are thought to have been inside the building when it caved in last Wednesday remain unaccounted for. A fire overnight further hampered the last desperate efforts to find survivors.

"We are giving the highest priority to saving people, but there is little hope of finding anyone alive," army spokesman Shahinul Islam told reporters at the site.

As anger continued to mount over the disaster, the owner of the building was arrested by police commandos on Sunday. Police said he had been trying to flee to India.

About 2,500 people have been rescued from the wrecked building in the commercial suburb of Savar, about 30km (20 miles) from the capital, Dhaka.

Late on Sunday, sparks from rescuers' cutting equipment started a fire in the debris as they raced to save a woman who may have been the last survivor in the rubble. Smoke was rising from the site on Monday.

Arrests and protests

Officials said the eight-storey complex had been built on swampy ground without the correct permits, and more than 3,000 workers — most of them young women — entered the building on Wednesday morning despite warnings that it was structurally unsafe.

A bank and shops in the same building closed after a jolt was felt and cracks were noticed on some pillars on Tuesday.

Seven people have been arrested over the disaster, four factory bosses, two engineers and building owner Mohammed Sohel Rana. Police are looking for a fifth factory boss, who they said was a Spanish citizen.

Rana, a local leader of the ruling Awami League's youth front, was shown on television being brought to Dhaka in handcuffs after he was seized in the border town of Benapole by the elite Rapid Action Battalion following a four-day manhunt.

Officials said he faced charges of faulty construction and causing unlawful death.

The collapse was the third major industrial incident in five months in Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments in the world behind China. In November, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory in a suburb of Dhaka killed 112 people.

Such incidents have raised serious questions about worker safety and low wages, and could taint the reputation of the poor South Asian country, which relies on garments for 80 percent of its exports. The industry employs about 3.6 million people, most of them women, some of whom earn as little as $38 a month.

In a development that may raise questions about the authorities' handling of the rescue operation, a spokesman at the British High Commission on Monday confirmed that an offer of technical assistance from Britain had been declined.

Anger over the disaster has sparked days of protests and clashes, and paramilitary troops were deployed in the industrial hub of Gazipur as garment workers took to the streets again on Monday, smashing cars and setting fire to an ambulance.

The unrest forced authorities to shut down many factories, which had reopened on Monday after two days of closures. Police fired teargas to disperse protesters.

The main opposition has called for a national strike on May 2 in protest over the incident.

Emdadul Islam, chief engineer of the state-run Capital Development Authority, said last that week that Rana had not received the proper construction consent for the building, and had illegally added three storeys to the original five.

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Taliban vow suicide and 'insider' attacks

KABUL: The Taliban in Afghanistan vowed on Saturday to start a new campaign of mass suicide attacks on foreign military bases and diplomatic areas, as well as damaging "insider attacks", as part of a new spring offensive this year.

The offensive was announced via emails from Taliban spokesmen. The Islamist group has made similar announcements in recent years, which have sometimes been followed by spikes in violence after Afghanistan's harsh winter months.
The announcement of more mass suicide and insider attacks will likely be greeted with concern by the Nato-led military coalition, which is in the final stages of a fight against the Taliban-led insurgency that began in late 2001.

However, there was no immediate reaction to the Taliban's statement from the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
After announcing their spring offensive last year, the Taliban launched a large attack in Kabul involving suicide bombers and an 18-hour firefight targeting Western embassies, ISAF headquarters and the Afghan parliament.

The start of the traditional "fighting season" is particularly important this year, with ISAF increasing the rate at which it hands security responsibility to Afghan forces before the withdrawal of most foreign troops by the end of 2014.

The Taliban statement said this year's offensive, named after Khalid bin Waleed, one of the companions of the Islamic prophet Mohammad, will involve "special military tactics" similar to those carried out previously. "Collective martyrdom operations on bases of foreign invaders, their diplomatic centres and military airbases will be even further structured while every possible tactic will be utilized in order to detain or inflict heavy casualties on the foreign transgressors," the statement said.

Insider attacks, also known as "green on blue" attacks, involve Afghan police or soldiers turning their guns on their ISAF trainers and counterparts. They have grown considerably since last year and have strained relations between Kabul and foreign forces.

However, there is considerable debate over how many can be attributed to infiltration by insurgents and how many are by disgruntled members of the Afghan security forces. Last August, then ISAF commander, US General John Allen, said about a quarter of such attacks involved the Taliban.

The spring offensive was coordinated to begin on April 28 to coincide with a national holiday to mark the overthrow of the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, the statement said.

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Thousands charged with corruption in China

BEIJING: China's prosecutors handled 3,657 corruption cases, and 1,481 cases involving dereliction of duty and rights violations during the first quarter of 2013, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said on Saturday.
All these violations had directly infringed upon peoples' interests, according to an SPP statement, which added that 5,102 people as well as a total volume of 540 million yuan ($87.5 million) were involved in the corruption and bribery cases, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The first three months saw 2,054 people found culpable of dereliction of duty or rights violations, including five municipal-level cadres.
The SPP statement said it will continue focusing on such cases that have a direct bearing on people's interests, namely cases in such sectors as food and drug safety, agriculture, education, employment, social security, medicine, housing, the environment, safe production, public security and law enforcement.

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Iraqi PM points to Syria over deadly 'sectarian' unrest

BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki pointed a finger on Saturday at the civil war in neighbouring Syria for the return of sectarian strife to Iraq, as a five-day wave of violence has killed 215 people.

And the head of the Sahwa anti-Qaida militia forces threatened war on militants if those who have killed Iraqi soldiers are not turned over.

Sectarian strife "came back to Iraq, because it began in another place in this region," Maliki said in televised remarks.

A civil war pitting mainly Sunni Muslim rebels against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, has killed more than 70,000 people.

In Iraq, Sunni-Shia sectarian violence, which peaked in 2006 and 2006, killed tens of thousands.

This week, 215 people have died in a wave of violence. "Sectarianism is evil, and the wind of sectarianism does not need a licence to cross from a country to another, because if it begins in a place, it will move to another place," Maliki said.

"Strife is knocking on the doors of everyone, and no one will survive if it enters, because there is a wind behind it, and money, and plans," he added, two days after warning of the danger of a return to "sectarian civil war."

A wave of violence began on Tuesday when security forces moved in against Sunni anti-government protesters near the northern Sunni Arab town of Hawijah, sparking clashes that left 53 people dead.

Subsequent unrest, much of it apparently linked to the Hawijah clashes, killed dozens more and brought the death toll to 215 by Saturday.

Iraqiya state television today quoted Sahwa chief Sheikh Wissam al-Hardan as saying that if those who have killed soldiers are not handed over, "the Sahwa will take the requested procedures and do what it did in 2006."

Sahwa militiamen fought pitched battles against Sunni militants from 2006, helping turn the tide of the Iraq war.

On Saturday, gunmen killed five soldiers from army intelligence and five anti-Qaida militiamen.

One group of soldiers were driving near the site of a long-running anti-government protest near Ramadi, west of Baghdad, when they were stopped by gunmen.

They shot one of the gunmen, wounding him, and clashes broke out in which four of the soldiers were killed and another wounded, a police lieutenant colonel and a doctor said.

Gunmen also killed a soldier and wounded another in a similar incident involving a second vehicle in the same area, the same sources said.

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'78k Bhutan refugees resettled in west'

KATHMANDU: Some 78,000 Bhutanese refugees have moved to the west from camps in Nepal where they have been living for two decades after being forced out of their homeland, the United Nations said on Friday.

The refugees have been offered new lives in the United States and other countries following the failure of years of negotiations to secure their return to Bhutan, which says they were illegal immigrants.

Another 38,000 refugees remain in the camps. All are ethnic Nepalese who fled across the border in the early 1990s, claiming persecution after Bhutan made national dress compulsory and banned the Nepalese language.

The United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR, said in a statement on Friday that 100,000 have submitted applications for the resettlement so far.

"Making 100,000 submissions and reaching nearly 80,000 departures are incredible achievements in the history of this refugee programme and for UNHCR," said Diane Goodman, acting representative of the UNHCR in Nepal.

"We have been able to achieve these major milestones thanks to the generosity of the resettlement countries and our donors, the great support of the government of Nepal, and the resilience of the refugees."

The programme began in 2007 following a lack of progress in years of high-level talks to secure their return to Bhutan.

Some 66,000 refugees have left for the United States, while Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain have also taken thousands.

The UNHCR said the total number of refugees to be resettled in the west is expected to reach 100,000 by the end of 2014.

"We spent more than 20 years in the camp but Bhutan didn't show any interest in repatriation so I think resettlement is the best option," Sher Bahadur Khadka, 30, who leaves for the United States next week with his wife, said.

"My wife and I will try to get jobs there. I would also like to study. I hope to manage time both for my work and education," he told reporters on Friday.

Refugee leaders have expressed fears that with so many people leaving the Nepal camps, pressure on Bhutan to allow the rest home will evaporate.

However, Goodman said UNHCR representative held talks with the Bhutanese government officials last year about repatriation and with the international community would continue to work towards the option of voluntary repatriation.

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Bangladesh collapse toll tops 300, many missing

SAVAR, BANGLADESH: More than two days after their factory collapsed on them, at least some garment workers were still alive in the corpse-littered debris on Friday, pinned beneath tons of mangled metal and concrete. Rescue crews struggled to save them, knowing they probably had just a few hours left to live, as desperate relatives clashed with police in their anger and grief.

Amid the chaos, the cries for help and the smell of decaying bodies at the eight-story building where more than 300 died, what happened to 18-year-old Mussamat Anna passes as luck. Rescue workers cut off the garment worker's mangled right hand to pull her free from the debris Thursday night.

"First a machine fell over my hand and I was crushed under the debris. ... Then the roof collapsed over me," she told a cameraman from a hospital bed on Friday.

The death toll topped 300 on Friday and it remained unclear what the final grim number would be. Military spokesman Shahin Islam told reporters that 304 bodies had been recovered.

Brig Gen Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing rescue operations, said 2,200 people have been rescued. The garment manufacturers' group said the factories in the building employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were inside it when it collapsed Wednesday in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka.

An army rescue worker, Major Abdul Latif, said on Friday that he found one survivor still trapped under concrete slabs, surrounded by several bodies. At another place in the building, four survivors were found pinned under the debris, a fire official said. A cameraman who accompanied a rescue crew heard two men's anguished cries for help; it was unknown on Friday whether they were still alive.

Rescue workers said they were proceeding very cautiously inside the crumbling building, using their hands, hammers and shovels, to avoid more injuries and collapses. But they said the trapped workers were so badly hurt and weakened that they would need to be extricated within a few hours if they are to survive. Facing high humidity and temperatures as high as 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), and dropping to about 24 C (75 F) at night, many survivors could also be badly dehydrated.

A military official, Maj Gen Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy, told reporters that search and rescue operations would continue until at least on Saturday.

"We know a human being can survive for up to 72 hours in this situation. So our efforts will continue nonstop," he said.

Hundreds of rescuers, some crawling through the maze of rubble, spent a third day working amid the cries of the trapped and the wails of workers' relatives gathered outside the building, which housed numerous garment factories and a handful of other companies.

Police cordoned off the building site, pushing back thousands of bystanders and relatives, after rescue workers said the crowds were hampering their work.

Clashes later erupted between relatives of those still trapped and police officers, who used batons to disperse the mobs. Police said 50 people were injured in the clashes.

"We want to go inside the building and find our people now. They will die if we don't find them soon," said Shahinur Rahman, whose mother was missing.

Elsewhere, many thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas took to the streets to protest the collapse and poor safety standards.

Local news reports said protesters smashed dozens of vehicles at one strike Friday. Most of the other protests were largely peaceful.

Dozens of people have been rescued from the wreckage well after Wednesday morning's collapse.

Forty people had been trapped on the fourth floor of the Rana Plaza building until rescuers reached them Thursday evening. Twelve were soon freed, and crews worked to get the others out safely, said Brig Gen Shikder. Crowds at the scene burst into applause as survivors were brought out.

Police say cracks in the building had led them to order an evacuation Tuesday, but the factories ignored the order and were operating when it collapsed Wednesday. Video shot before the collapse shows cracks in the walls, with apparent attempts at repair. It also shows columns missing chunks of concrete and police talking to building operators.

Officials said soon after the collapse that numerous construction regulations had been violated.

Abdul Halim, an official with Savar's engineering department, said the owner of Rana Plaza was originally allowed to construct a five-story building but added another three stories illegally.

Mahbubul Haque Shakil, a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said she had ordered police to arrest the owner of the building as well as the owners of the garment factories in "the shortest possible time."

Local police chief Mohammed Asaduzzaman said police and the government's Capital Development Authority have filed separate cases of negligence against the building owner.

Habibur Rahman, police superintendent of Dhaka district, identified the owner of the building as Mohammed Sohel Rana, a local leader of ruling Awami League's youth front. Rahman said police were also looking for the owners of the garment factories.

Police on Friday detained two of Rana's relatives for questioning, police officer Mohammad Kawser said.

The disaster is the worst ever for Bangladesh's booming and powerful garment industry, surpassing a fire five months ago that killed 112 people and brought widespread pledges to improve the country's worker-safety standards.

Instead, very little has changed in Bangladesh, where wages, among the lowest in the world, have made it a magnet for numerous global brands.

Bangladesh's garment industry was the third-largest in the world in 2011, after China and Italy. It has grown rapidly in the past decade, a boom fueled by Bangladesh's exceptionally low labor costs. The country's minimum wage is now the equivalent of about $38 a month.

Among the garment makers in the building were Phantom Apparels, Phantom Tac, Ether Tex, New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms. Altogether, they produced several million shirts, pants and other garments a year.

The New Wave companies, according to their website, make clothing for several major North American and European retailers.

Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them.

Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production.

U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the collapse underscored the "urgent need" for Bangladesh's government, as well as the factory owners, buyers and labor groups, to improve working conditions in the country.

Human Rights Watch says Bangladesh's ministry of labor has only 18 inspectors to monitor thousands of garment factories in the sprawling Dhaka district, where much of the nation's garment industry is located.

John Sifton, the group's Asia advocacy director, also noted that none of the factories in the Rana Plaza were unionized, and that had they been, workers would have been in a better position to refuse to enter the building on Wednesday.

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France gay marriage may affect adoptions: Putin

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Friday said Russia could change agreements for the adoption of Russian children made with France and other western states that are legalizing gay marriage. "I consider it fully correct to make changes to the appropriate documents. It is a current issue and we need to think about it," Putin said at a meeting with lawmakers.

"We need to react to what is going on around us. We respect our partners but ask (that they) respect the cultural traditions and ethical, legal and moral norms of Russia," Putin said, quoted by Russian news agencies. The Russian parliament, in a law signed by Putin, had already caused a storm last year by banning the adoption of Russian children by American families.

That law was adopted as part of retaliation for human rights legislation adopted by US lawmakers. The Interfax news agency said Putin's comments on Friday were in response to a question posed by a lawmaker from the western Russian region of Kaliningrad who directly referred to the adoption this month of a bill by the French parliament legalizing same-sex marriage.

The lawmaker, named as Marina Orgiyeva, suggested making changes in adoption agreements with France to ensure that Russian children did not fall into the hands of same-sex parents. Putin did not specify what changes he wanted to see in the agreements.

French President Francois Hollande has promised to sign the gay marriage bill into law as soon as France's constitutional council rules on a challenge filed by right-wing lawmakers. Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1993 and officially removed it from the list of psychiatric disorders in 1999. However, homophobia remains widespread and socially acceptable, and almost no public figures have come out as gay.

Putin prides himself on a virile, heterosexual image. Several Russian regions have outraged rights campaigners by approving local laws banning gay propaganda among minors, in legislation which is now in the initial stages of discussion at the federal parliament.

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US asks China to safeguard rights of Uighurs

WASHINGTON: The US has asked China to safeguard the rights of its Uighur minority in Xinjiang province and carry out a transparent probe into the latest incident of violence in which 21 people died.

"We are deeply concerned by the reports of violent confrontation in Xinjiang that left 21 people dead. We will continue to monitor the situation carefully," US state department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell told reporters.

"We regret the unfortunate acts of violence that led to these casualties, and we'll continue to encourage Chinese officials to take steps to reduce tensions and promote long-term stability in Xinjiang," he said.

Ventrell asked the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation of this incident, and to provide all Chinese citizens, including Uighurs, the due process protections to which they are entitled not only under China's constitutional laws but under their international human rights commitments as well.

During the press conference, Ventrell also urged China to release Memetjan Abdulla, who worked as an editor of the state-run China National Radio's Uighur Service and was detained in July 2009 for allegedly instigating ethnic rioting in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region.

On April 1, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. "The exact charges against Abdullah were not disclosed, but Radio Free Asia reported on the sentence and cited a witness at the trial that stated that Abdullah was targeted for talking to international journalists in Beijing about the riots as well as translating articles on the website.

"We call on the government of China to release Memetjan Abdulla and all other journalists imprisoned for their work," the US official said.

When asked about the US assessment of the situation with the Uighurs in China, Ventrell said the state department is "deeply concerned" by ongoing reports of discrimination against and restrictions on Uighurs and other Muslims in China.

"We urge the Chinese government to cease policies that seek to restrict the practice of religious beliefs across China. But we've been particularly concerned about the Uighurs and have stated so publicly in the past," he said.

Further the US also remain "deeply concerned" that Chinese authorities continue to hold Liu Xia, wife of Nobel Laureate and imprisoned activist Liu Xiaobo under unjustified and extra-legal house arrest, he said.

China frequently voices anger at US criticism of its human rights record, although the world's two largest economies cooperate frequently in other areas, including trade and on the showdown with Beijing's ally North Korea.

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