Government officials said the consul and his driver were killed by two unknown gunmen in the centre of the capital, Bishkek, on Saturday night.

A Kyrgyz Government spokesman said the attack may be linked to Muslim Uighur separatists.

But he also said the killing may have been a Mafia-style contract murder with a businessman travelling in the consul's car as the main target.

Chinese targeted

Eyewitnesses saw two young men firing with a pistol at the diplomat's Mercedes, according to the interior ministry.

The assailants then fled in another car.

This is not the first time Chinese officials have been attacked in Kyrgyzstan.

Two businessmen died and another was wounded in May 2000, when gunmen opened fire on their car in Bishkek.

Four Uighur separatists are appealing death sentences after being convicted for that attack.

Separatist demands

Kyrgyzstan shares a border with China - the Central Asian state's main trading partner outside the former Soviet Union. Bishkek's bazaars are full of Chinese goods.

Some 20,000 Uighurs live in Kyrgyzstan, and many of them still retain cultural and business links with their homeland.

The Uighur separatist movement was founded in the early 1990s in the Xingjiang region of western China, with the aim of creating an Islamic state.

Xinjiang contains around nine million Muslims - mainly Turkic-speaking ethnic Uighurs - who form a majority of the population despite the rapid influx of ethnic Han Chinese settlers.

Beijing is anxious to stop the separatist movement gaining support from fellow Muslims in Central Asia.

There have also been anti-government protests in Kyrgyzstan recently, calling for a border agreement, which cedes 90,000 hectares to China, to be annulled.