Abduqeyum Semet has reportedly been in prison since 2018
Beijing:
A Uyghur doctor, who served as a torchbearer at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, is serving an 18-year prison sentence, a media report said.
Abduqeyum Semet, a doctor in Kashgar, was arrested, given a long prison term and served his term in a detention center operated by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), Radio Free Asia reported citing Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and linguist living in Norway, who confirmed the news of Uyghurs living in exile.
Notably, the XPCC is an economic and paramilitary state organization that has been sanctioned by the US government for its involvement in human rights violations against Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Abduqeyum has reportedly been jailed since 2018 for “refusing to follow Chinese government guidelines,” the media reported, citing a court official in Kashgar.
Government officials issued papers about Abduqeyum so that others could learn a lesson from his “bad example,” the official said.
However, Chinese government officials refused to release information about Abduqeyum’s jail term or the detention facility where he is being held.
Chinese authorities are trying to portray members of the Muslim minority group as happy, dancing “model Uyghurs” in arts and sports to cover up the oppression facing the community in China, Radio Free Asia reported, citing Uyghur activists in exile.
According to an earlier media report, at least eight Uyghur torchbearers from the 2008 Beijing Olympics are in jail in Xinjiang, including Abduqeyum and Adil Abdurehim, a former Chinese government official, who is serving a 14-year prison sentence for watching counter-revolutionary videos.
In particular, China has been reprimanded worldwide for its crackdown on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, disrupting their religious activities and sending community members to undergo some form of forced reeducation or indoctrination.
The Chinese government, which stepped up its crackdown on Uyghurs in 2017, is said to have detained 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkish minorities in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
