China has executed a Uighur activist in a far northwestern city for attempting to "split the motherland" and possessing firearms and explosives, drawing condemnation from a human rights group, which said that evidence against him was insufficient.
Ismail Semed, who was deported to China from Pakistan in 2003, had told the court his confession had been coerced, but he was executed nevertheless on Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted his widow, Buhejer, as saying yesterday.
"When the body was transferred to us at the cemetery I saw only one bullet hole in his heart," Buhejer told the radio station, which receives funding from the US government.
A spokeswoman for the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court said a group of people had been executed on Thursday but said she had no knowledge of specific cases.
The Xinjiang regional government declined to comment.
Xinjian's Turkic-speaking Mus-lim Uighurs number between 8 million and 20 million
RFA said the charge of attempting to split the motherland stemmed from the allegation that Semed was a founding member of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which has been outlawed by Beijing as a terrorist group.
But Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: "The death penalty was widely disproportionate to the alleged crimes ... his trial did not meet minimum requirements of fairness and due process."
"We don't think there was sufficient evidence to condemn him," Bequelin said.
China has waged a harsh campaign in recent years against what it says are violent separatists and Islamic extremists struggling to set up an independent "East Turke-stan" in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang shares a border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia.
Buhejer met her husband briefly on Monday shortly after she had been informed of the decision to execute him, RFA said.
"[It was] only for 10 minutes, we didn't have too much time to talk ... Previously, he had said his leg hurt and his stomach hurt and other parts of his body hurt and that he needed medicine," she said.
She said her husband had told the court during his trial that his confession was coerced.
"They forced me," she quoted him as saying.
He told her to "take care of our children and let them get a good education," she said.
The couple has a young son and daughter.
Two other Uighurs who testified against Semed were also executed, RFA quoted unnamed sources in the region as saying.
Semed had previously served two prison sentences for taking part in an uprising in 1990. He fled to Pakistan after participating in demonstrations for religious freedom in 1997 that ended in the Gulja Massacre when government troops were sent in to stop the protest.
T. Kumar of Amnesty International in Washington said "hun-dreds, if not thousands, were killed or seriously injured" in unrest sparked by the incident in February 1997.
In a reference to another case now in court in Urumqi, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Thursday that Canadian diplomats had no right to be present at the hearing of Hussein Celil (also known as Yu Shanjiang, 玉山江), a Uighur accused by China of terrorism who was awarded Canadian citizenship two years ago.
Celil fled China in the 1990s and traveled last year to Uzbekistan, where he was detained and then extradited to China on terrorism charges.
He was cited in court documents related to Semed as a co-conspirator, Bequelin said.
China has not recognized Celil's Canadian citizenship.
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