A CHINA Southern Airlines crew has received a cash reward of 400,000 yuan (US$56,738) for successfully preventing a terrorist attack on a plane flying from Urumqi to Beijing earlier this month, the Beijing News reported yesterday.

The carrier held a ceremony last Wednesday to present the reward to the crew of flight CZ6901 who found gasoline being carried by a female passenger as part of the terrorist attack March 7, the report said.

The plane cut short its journey from Xinjiang to Beijing and landed in the northwestern city of Lanzhou.

China's aviation regulator, the General Administration of Civil Aviation (CAAC), said the crew had successfully foiled an attack of "malicious political intentions ... organized by internationally backed terrorists," in a report posted on its Web site Tuesday.

Officials have not provided a detailed account of the incident. But sources later told Reuters that the chief suspects, a man and a woman, boarded the flight using Pakistani passports and carrying cans flammable liquids.

The woman, who had been born in Xinjiang but spent many years in Pakistan, failed to light the liquid in the plane toilet, and aroused the suspicion of crew and other passengers when she came out of the toilet to pick up the second can, one source said.

Xinjiang officials said the suspects confessed to planning an attack. An aviation source last week told reporters that a third suspect, a Pakistani, was still at large.

The region's Communist Party Secretary Wang Lequan told officials to be on guard against"separatist"threats, Xinjiang's official news Web site reported yesterday.

A senior Chinese official said recently that extremist Uygurs from Xinjiang were plotting attacks on the Beijing Olympics.

(SD-Agencies)