Authorities in China's Muslim-majority Xinjiang region have detained a Uighur woman and 37 of her students, some as young as seven, for studying the Koran, a rights group said yesterday.
Aminan Momixi, 56, was teaching the Koran to the students aged between seven and 20 at her home on Aug. 1 when police burst in and arrested her, the German-based World Uighur Congress said.
Her students, most of whom were primary and secondary school pupils, were also arrested and some remain in detention, it said.
Police confiscated 23 copies of the Koran, 56 textbooks on the Koran, a hand-written manuscript and other religious materials, the organization said. Momixi was accused of "illegally possessing religious materials and subversive historical information," the congress said, adding that she had been denied access to a lawyer.
A police officer confirmed the detentions, and added, "This is our internal issue, we cannot disclose the reason."
The congress' spokesman Dilxat Raxit said some children had been released after parents paid fines of between 7,000 and 10,000 yuan (US$863 and US$1,233). He did not know how many were still detained.
"Some parents simply can't afford it. They live in the countryside and have to sell their cows and yaks to get their children out," he said.
Raxit said the parents just wanted their children to learn moral values which the Koran taught them. China bans all religious activities outside state control.
"They just want their children to learn the Koran, the most basic religious knowledge, during the summer holiday," he said.
Uighurs are a Turkish-speaking minority of 8 million whose traditional homeland lies in the oil-rich Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwestern China.
Xinjiang has been autonomous since 1955 but continues to be the subject of crackdowns by Chinese authorities, who have been accused by rights groups of religious repression against Uighurs in the name of counter-terrorism efforts.
Raxit denied that Muslim religious education leads to terrorism.
"It has no link to that whatsoever. What have seven-year-old children got to do with terrorism?" he said.
In a 114-page report released this year, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China said Chinese policy in Xinjiang "denies Uighurs religious freedom, and by extension freedom of association, assembly, and expression."
"Uighurs are seen by Beijing as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state," said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China.
"As Islam is perceived as underpinning Uighur ethnic identity, China has taken draconian steps to smother Islam as a means of subordinating Uighur nationalist sentiment," she said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the