Uyghurs marked the one-year anniversary of a deadly fire in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi with vigils over the weekend, demanding accountability for the tragedy that they say killed as many as 44 people, four times higher than the official death toll of 10.
A young Uyghur businessman who was reportedly arrested in 2016 on vague separatist charges has been serving a 15-year prison sentence since 2017 for illegal religious activities, a police officer in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province confirmed to Radio Free Asia.
For years, the young Uyghur entrepreneur was held up in Chinese media as a role model for other Uyghur youth – a clean-shaven, smartly-dressed young man who returned to China to start his educational consulting business after getting an MBA in the United States.
A prominent U.S.-based Uyghur activist said he learned this week that his father died seven months ago in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, though the circumstances of his death remain unclear.
Chinese authorities have begun selling tickets to tourists to visit the historic Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar – where they have prohibited Muslim Uyghurs from praying for years except for certain holy days and for propaganda purposes, officials in the ancient city in Xinjiang said.
A Uyghur university student named Mehmut Memtimin who was arrested more than five years ago by police in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region is serving a 13-year prison sentence, a policeman involved in his apprehension said.
Meryem Ismayil was a law student at Xinjiang University when she took her life five years ago. The 22-year-old Uyghur from Aqerik village in Xinjiang’s Shayar County was distraught over the detention of her father, a Chinese Communist party cadre and member of the village’s People’s Congress.
Uyghurs seeking justice for loved ones imprisoned in China have turned to a little-known United Nations body for help.
Lazy persons, drunkards, and “other persons with insufficient inner motivation” must be subjected to “repeated … thought education” to ensure they take part in state-sponsored “poverty alleviation” campaigns to pick cotton in China’s Xinjiang region, a previously unpublished internal government document ordered local cadres.
The death of a Uyghur detainee held in a refugee detention center in Thailand has intensified calls from human rights organizations for Thai authorities to provide better living conditions and health services for Uyghur inmates and to allow them to apply for asylum.