PIO wins Pulitzer for exposing Muslims’ detention in China
New York, June 12: Megha Rajagopalan, an Indianorigin journalist, along with two contributors has won the Pulitzer Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its restive Xinjiang region.
Rajagopalan from BuzzFeed News is among two Indian-origin journalists who won the US’ top journalism award on Friday. Tampa Bay Times’ Neil Bedi won for local reporting. Bedi along with Kathleen McGrory has been awarded the prize for the series exposing a Sheriff ’s Office initiative that used computer modelling to identify people believed to be future crime suspects.
About 1,000 people were monitored under the programme, including children. Bedi is an investigative reporter for the Tampa Bay Times.
“What Kathleen and Neil unearthed in Pasco County has had a profound impact on the community,” said Mark Katches, Times executive editor. “This is what the best investigative journalism can do and why it is so essential.”
Rajagopalan’s Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category. In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp — at a time when China denied that such places existed, BuzzFeed News said.
“In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its entry for the prize. “It would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and stymie journalists. The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a