Last year, a Uyghur man imprisoned in one of China’s labor camps died. Chinese officials claimed he died from a heart attack. But Radio ...
Last year, a Uyghur man imprisoned in one of China’s labor camps died. Chinese officials claimed he died from a heart attack.
But Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that the man, referred to only as Ghalipjan, was actually beaten to death by a drunk police officer while in custody. Ghalipjan, 35, was detained in Pichan county in one of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s (XUAR) internment camps. RFA estimates that more than “1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring ‘strong religious views’ and ‘politically incorrect’ ideas since April 2017” have been detained in the labor camps.
China claims the camps are education facilities to reduce terrorism, but as The Daily Wire previously reported, the centers are run like third-world prisons where detainees are regularly sexually assaulted, tortured, experimented on, and given little to no food — all while living in deplorable conditions.
RFA reports that it received a letter from a source that said Ghalipjan’s mother was told the day he died that it was due to a heart attack from an undiagnosed heart condition. The authorities told her that he was sent to a nearby hospital. Ghalipjan’s family went to the hospital to see his body and found he still had a defibrillator attached to his chest. Family members were not allowed to inspect his body.
“Communist Party cadres from No. 1 village in Pichan’s Lamjin (Lianmuqin) township, where Ghalipjan lived with his wife and five-year-old child, oversaw the burial of the young man on the same night that he died, and inexplicably denied family members the right to wash his body according to Muslim funerary traditions,” RFA reported from the letter.
After talking to multiple sources, RFA was told by the head of a local neighborhood committee that Ghalipjan had actually been killed by a police officer “from the Labai Square Police Station” while detained in one of the prison camps.
“He was beaten to death … [by] a police officer,” the source told RFA over the phone. “The officer came to work after drinking alcohol and beat him without any reason.”
The source then told RFA that the police officer who beat Ghalipjan to death was “in prison,” but did not know his identity.
On Tuesday, RFA reported that at least 150 have died in a single XUAR internment camp in the past six months. The deaths all occurred at one of four labor camps in Kuchar County. A Kuchar County police officer told RFA that around 150 people had died in the six months that he worked at the camp and could not provide details about deaths prior to his term.
Another police officer, Himit Qari, who was the chief of police in Ucha township, was detained after making remarks critical of the camps. Qari said at an event that “many people died” at one of the camps where he worked as a security guard.
Recent reports suggest the camps are being used to harvest organs from prisoners to fuel China’s lucrative “medical tourism” industry.
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