Thread by @WilliamYang120

Rabigul Haji Muhammed was stunned to see a former classmate on a leaked list of #Uyghurs and other Turkic people detained in internment camps in #China’s far-western #Xinjiang region. rfa.org/english/news/u…

The doctoral student in Turkology at Hacettepe University in Turkey was searching through a trove of classified documents published by a U.S.–based human rights group in May. One of the group’s researchers had been given the information from an anonymous source.

Muhammad saw that Nurali Ablet had been detained for “engaging in online propaganda about violence and terrorism.” Ablet majored in the Uyghur language at the Central Nationalities University, also known as Minzu University, in Beijing and graduated in 2015, she said.

I knew him very well from those five years in college. He was a very hard-working and active student at the university,” she told RFA. “People like Nurali are not just images for us, they are living beings like us and everyone else.”

Muhammad and other Uyghurs living in exile have scoured the Xinjiang Police Files since the document was first published by the Washington, D.C.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on May 24, ...

... searching for information about missing relatives or friends, or on the off chance they might know someone who unbeknownst to them had been detained by Chinese authorities.

Many say that the abducted Uyghurs are college-educated, law-abiding and working-class –– not “terrorists” in any sense of the word.

Among the county’s more than 3,700 detainees labeled as “trainees” in Chinese government documents, the youngest is 14 years old, and the oldest is 73. Some photos show police minders wielding batons standing next to the detainees.

The documents also describe a “shoot to kill” directive should the trainees try to escape what the Chinese government has called “voluntary vocational training centers” and the Chinese media has described as ordinary places of education.

According to the files, Tajigul Tahir’s son was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2017 for being a “non-alcoholic and non-smoker” — signs, according to authorities, of his extremism.

The 60-year-old woman was later arrested herself because she was the mother of an imprisoned Uyghur.

Abdurrahman Qasim, a Uyghur based in Turkey, said he found the name of his former cellmate, Mehmutjan Nasir, in the leaked documents.

They were in detention together in Hotan (Hetian), another city in southern Xinjiang, but met each other previously in Hotan when Nasir was a student at the Hotan Uyghur Medical College.

Authorities detained Nasir in 2010 for communicating with people who prayed. A few years earlier, he had posted his Chinese national identification card on WeChat, ...

... a Chinese instant messaging social media app, of which Qasim took a screenshot. Qasim said he was able to find Nasir’s ID details when the files were published.

“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,” Qasim said.

“I was very saddened to find him on the detained Uyghurs’ list.”