BEIJING — Chinese security officials have issued a list of six men suspected of being members of a militant group that they said used Asian nations as staging grounds for terrorist attacks in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang.

The group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, has claimed responsibility for a series of knifings and explosions that killed at least 18 people last July in Xinjiang, home to ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and largely Muslim people who make up about 40 percent of the region’s population. The July attacks, in the city of Kashgar, were among several in recent years, apparently mounted by Islamic separatists protesting the heavy-handed rule of Uighurs by China’s Han majority and seeking independence in what they call East Turkestan.

In a posting on its Web site late Thursday, China’s Ministry of Public Security displayed the names and photographs of the six suspects, calling five of them major figures in the East Turkestan group, and it gave accounts of the crimes they were accused of. The ministry said all six had engaged in terrorist activities in Central, West and Southeast Asia as well as in “a certain South Asian country,” a veiled reference to Pakistan. China has repeatedly said that Islamic terrorists who strike in Uighur areas are trained in Pakistan.

Some human rights advocates discount the importance of the East Turkestan group, widely referred to as E.T.I.M., saying that the movement is small and largely ineffective, and that many attacks, which involve crude weapons like knives, do not bear the earmarks of a terrorist organization’s support.