Eleven sentenced, including one to six years in prison, for allegedly preaching holy war and promoting racial hatred

Courts in China's far western region of Xinjiang have sentenced 11 ethnic Uighurs to up to six years in jail for promoting racial hatred and religious extremism online, in the latest crackdown on what China sees as violent separatists.

Eight of those convicted came from the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, the Justice Ministry's official newspaper Legal Daily reported on its website.

In one of the cases, the suspect went on illegal websites to download material that "whipped up religious fervour and preached 'holy war'" and "whipped up ethnic enmity", the Legal Daily said in its report late on Wednesday.

"This created a despicable effect on society," the newspaper said, citing the court ruling.

Another suspect was jailed for spreading via the internet materials from overseas that "advocate religious extremism and terrorism", the newspaper reported. Legal Daily said Aihetaimu Heli was given the harshest sentence of six years in jail for uploading to the internet materials promoting jihad and ethnic hatred.

The sentence was handed down on Wednesday in the far-western city of Aksu, the paper said.

In Kashgar, eight others were sentenced to between two to five years for creating a public nuisance after breaking into homes and destroying 17 television sets in what the paper called a religious frenzy.

Two others were fined and given less serious administrative punishments of from five to 15 days for posting extremist material to a blog and spreading rumors of a suicide bombing on the popular QQ internet messaging service.

The report did not specify the ethnicity of those jailed, but their names and the location of the courts where they were sentenced indicated they were all Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people.

China accuses armed Uighur groups of having links to central Asian and Pakistani Islamist militants, and of carrying out attacks to establish an independent state called East Turkistan.

Many rights groups say China overplays the threat posed to justify its tough controls in Xinjiang.

The region, which lies strategically on the borders of central Asia, India and Pakistan, has been the site of frequent outbreaks of ethnic violence.

In April, 21 people were killed in clashes near Kashgar, the deadliest unrest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.