* World Uighur Congress says Chinese Muslims being barred from flights outright

Members of a Muslim minority in western China say that they are being discouraged or barred from air travel amid an Olympic security clampdown that Beijing says is aimed at terrorist threats.

"The security is really intense now. They went through everything I have," said a Uighur produce trader who gave only his first name Hasmat, after a body search at the airport in Urumqi, the capital of the mostly Muslim Xinjiang region. Hasmat said that he was required to obtain letters from firms he planned to visit before he could obtain a ticket from a Chinese airline for a business trip to the city of Xian.

He said he was told that the requirement was imposed by the government because of Olympic security. "It is because I am Uighur. It is unfair," said Hasmat, who said he had moved about freely in the past. China says it has broken up at least a dozen terrorist cells planning attacks targeting the August 8-24 Olympics, including an alleged failed plot by an Uighur woman to blow up a plane flying from Urumqi to Beijing in March. Uighurs, who number more than eight million in Xinjiang, are a Turkic-speaking central Asian people who have long chafed under Chinese control. The government says Uighur separatists seeking an independent homeland want to target the Games, but rights groups accuse Beijing of exaggerating the threat in order to stifle dissent in Xinjiang.

Barred: The Munich-based World Uighur Congress, an exile group opposed to China's control of Xinjiang, a vast region of harsh deserts and majestic mountain ranges, says many Uighurs are being barred from planes outright.

"They cannot buy the tickets. They are being told they are sold out," Dilxat Raxit, the group's spokesman, told AFP. He said that the restrictions were especially tight for travel to Beijing. In one case, he said, Muslims were incensed when authorities forced a young Uighur woman to undergo a strip search before boarding a train in Kashgar, a historic Silk Road oasis city near the Pakistan border.

"This is part of a pattern of discrimination against Uighurs by the Chinese authorities," he said. An official at Xinjiang police headquarters in Urumqi denied the allegations, and a spokeswoman for the Civil Aviation Administration of China said that there were no restrictions on air travel by Uighurs. "That's impossible. As far as I know, there is no such regulation," she said.