Pakistani authorities began conducting unexpected house raids on the homes of Uyghurs living in Rawalpindi just before a government order to expel all illegal migrants who had not left the country by the start of November took effect, according to Uyghurs involved in the matter.
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 Uyghur design director who has worked for a Chinese locomotive manufacturer in Turkey for more than a decade was arrested by Chinese authorities in March when he returned to Xinjiang for a family visit, company employees said.
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take part in state-sponsored “poverty alleviation” campaigns to pick cotton in China’s Xinjiang region, a previously unpublished internal government document ordered local cadres.