Beijing [China], July 10 (ANI): Several Uyghurs abroad are shocked to find the names of their relatives listed in leaked police files which contained information about detained Uyghurs and other Turkic people by Chinese authorities.
Earlier, Xinjiang Police Files that contained information regarding the detained Uyghurs and other Turkic people in internment camps in China’s far-western Xinjiang region were leaked. The list previously contained only their names and identification numbers, however, the new information also contains their photos as well as information about their alleged crimes.
Rabigul Haji Muhammad found the name of his former classmate Nurali Ablet, who was detained for “engaging in online propaganda about violence and terrorism,” while searching through a trove of classified documents published by a US-based human rights group in May, Global Security organisation reported citing Radio Free Asia.
“I knew him very well from those five years in college. He was a very hard-working and active student at the university. People like Nurali are not just images for us, they are living beings like us and everyone else,” she said.
It has been claimed that the detained Uyghurs were not “terrorists” but college-educated, law-abiding and working-class.
“I found Nabijan Yusuf, who was the son of my elementary school teacher. I knew him since he was a child. By looking at all the images I concluded that the Chinese government targeted more Uyghurs who were born in the 1980s and ’90s than other generations,” a US-based Uyghur said.
Nursimangul Abdureshid, an Uyghur living in Turkey, was searching for information about her parents and siblings in the Xinjiang Police Files and found information about her childhood friends Buhelchem Memet, Memetjan Tursun and Qari Tahir along with her family friends Baki Hussein and Hoshur Abliz, and Juma Tomur.
The files state that the son of Tajigul Tahir was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for being a “non-alcoholic and non-smoker,” it added. Tahir was later arrested as well for being the mother of the detained Uyghur.
Mehmutjan Nasir was detained in 2010 for communicating with people who prayed. “I searched the images in the files for people I know or any relative who might be among the images, and after looking at more than 1,000 images, I found Mehmutjan Nasir who was my cellmate in Hotan from late 2010 to early 2011. I was very saddened to find him on the detained Uyghurs’ list,” his former cellmate Abdurrahman Qasim said.
Abduweli Ayup recognized Tajigul Abdurusul and Iziz Atawullah, two Uyghurs who had been county primary school teachers for more than 20 years, along with a photo of his classmate, Matyar Ghopur.
It is believed that over 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have been in detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017, allegedly to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.
The Chinese authorities said that they were “vocational training centres” voluntarily attended by “students” to study Mandarin and the law and to obtain new skills, the organisation added. A “shoot to kill” directive has been specified in the documents for trainees that try to escape.
The data was handed to an international media consortium before being validated, examined, and selected by Dr Adrian Zenz, a specialist on China’s northwest Xinjiang detention campaign targeting Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic minorities.
According to Zenz, the papers are solid proof of what is “perhaps the biggest internment of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust… The new information emphasises the character of this tragedy.”
This “demonstrates how closely and intimately the central government has been involved in this crime from the start,” Zenz had previously said adding that Beijing’s overall aim is to “break the back of whole ethnic communities” by interning them. (ANI)