China’s brutal ‘re-education’ camps exposed
Manacles, hoods, sadistic guards wielding baseball bats... will these leaked pictures revealing barbaric treatment of Uighur Muslims finally hold Beijing to account?
DAMNING documents and photographs have revealed the horrors that Uighur Muslims face in China’s brutal ‘re-education camps’.
The trove of leaked data, hacked from the authorities, reveals a sickening shootto-kill policy for those trying to escape while horrific pictures appear to show shackled prisoners being tortured.
The leak exposes how thousands of Uighurs have been detained on trumped-up ‘terrorism’ charges and given long sentences.
It provides an unprecedented insight into the camps built since 2017 across Xinjiang in north-west China. Critics say ‘the Chinese propaganda veneer’ has been blown apart.
In one particularly disturbing image, two young men are shackled and hooded as they are held in stress positions.
It is not clear whether the pictures are of actual detainees or a training exercise but is evidence of the brutality believed to be being meted out by guards.
The classified haul, dubbed the Xinjiang Police Files, lays bare how more than 20,000 Uighurs were held between 2017 and 2018.
The images show they are far from the willing ‘students’ China has long claimed.
The police protocols describe routine use of armed officers in all areas and the positioning of machine guns and sniper rifles in watchtowers. In many of the images the threat of physical force is visible, with guards brandishing rifles and batons.
Blindfolds, handcuffs and shackles are mandatory when any ‘student’ is transferred between facilities. The files revealed the terrified faces of nearly 3,000 detainees.
Many have been jailed for ordinary signs of the Islamic faith including a man given ten years on terrorism charges for ‘not smoking or drinking’. His mother was targeted by the authorities for ‘guilt by association’.
A list of ‘relatives of the detained’ show that thousands were placed under suspicion by the authorities. Others were punished for visiting Muslim countries or, in the case of a man, jailed for nearly 17 years for growing a beard. He was said to be ‘under the influence of religious extremism’.
Many are punished retrospectively for supposed crimes carried out well before China launched its crackdown on the region in 2014 following two terror attacks blamed on Islamic extremists from Xinjiang.
Examples include a man jailed for ten years for studying ‘Islamic scripture with his grandmother’ for a few days in 2010. Hundreds are targeted for using mobile phones to listen to ‘illegal lectures’.
Dr Adrian Zenz, a scholar at the US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, received the cache from a source who claims to have decrypted them from police computer servers. He said: ‘We have everything – we have confidential documents. We have speech transcripts where leaders freely talk about what they really think.
‘It blows apart the Chinese propaganda veneer.’
Beijing officials including foreign minister Wang Yi have claimed the camps are ‘schools that help people free themselves from extremism’.
And in a written response to the leak, the Chinese embassy in Washington DC said: ‘Xinjiang-related issues are in essence about countering violent terrorism, radicalisation and separatism, not about human rights or religion.’