Chinese state media have released a video that allegedly proves that Uighur poet and musician Abdurehim Heyit is alive, after Turkey cited reports of his death in custody in a strongly worded condemnation of “human rights violations” in Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
In the 26-second video posted online by China Radio International’s Turkish-language service late on Sunday, a man dressed in a gray sweater identifies himself as Heyit before declaring himself to be in “good health.”
“Today is February 10, 2019,” he said. “I’m in the process of being investigated for allegedly violating the national laws. I’m now in good health and have never been abused,” he says.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm the authenticity of the video.
On Saturday, in a rare move from a majority-Muslim power, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on China to close its internment camps for Muslims, saying that the camps said to hold 1 million ethnic Uighurs are a “great shame for humanity.”
That statement had come in response to a question about recent reports that Heyit, a well-known poet and musician, had died while in Chinese detention, having been “sentenced to eight years in prison for one of his songs.”
“This tragedy has further reinforced the reaction of the Turkish public opinion toward serious human rights violations committed in the Xinjiang region,” ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said on Sunday.
The Chinese embassy in Ankara said that Aksoy’s accusations were false and urged the Turkish government to retract them.
Uighur diaspora activists said Heyit’s body language and unnatural speech patterns in the video suggested his testimony might have been coerced and that even digital alteration could not be ruled out.
International rights groups have said that China routinely coerces detainees into making videotaped confessions, which are then broadcast through state media to serve the Chinese government’s propaganda objectives.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Xinjiang regional government did not immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.
Beijing has faced an outcry from advocates, activists, foreign governments and UN rights experts over what they call mass detentions and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups who call Xinjiang home.
China denied the existence of the so-called “re-education” facilities for months before saying they were vocational training centers designed to combat religious extremism and has increasingly been on the front foot in defending its actions.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS