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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Chinese Police Raid Uighur Homes in Xinjiang |
| 2008-04-13 |
| Chinese police have conducted raids on several houses in the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang, possibly looking for weapons, sources in the area have told Radio Free Asia (RFA). Authorities in Yengiyer township near Gulja (in Chinese, Yili) city raided four familiy homes belonging to Muslim Uyghurs, detaining several people, the sources said. Police dug up the yard at one house, although they gave no indication what they were looking for, a Uyghur source in Gulja told RFA’s Uyghur service. Police in Gulja acknowledged that a secret operation ordered by top officials in Xinjiang had taken place in recent days, but they declined to give details. An officer on duty at the Yengiyer township police bureau said: “Sorry, we cannot tell you about this without getting higher-lever official approval. You can leave your telephone number.” A duty officer at the Gulja municipal police department said the topic was secret. “We can’t tell you about this—it’s secret,” he said. “Even some of our fellow police officers don’t know about it in our own bureau. You cannot just ask me by phone about these sensitive issues.” “If you want to know more detail about this, you should ask the [Xinjiang Uyghur] Autonomous Region police bureau. They are the ones who ordered the action, I cannot tell you the operation codename. It is secret,” he added. A Han Chinese resident of Alamatuya village in Yengiyer township said that at least one house had been searched by police in his neighborhood. “Because the Uyghurs were causing trouble...They had explosives in their house,” he told RFA’s Mandarin service. “Maybe someone reported it,” he said, adding that he believed the Uyghurs had been influenced by recent unrest in Tibet and were possibly connected to unrest in Gulja which was brutally suppressed by Chinese security forces in the 1990s. “Some say more than a dozen were taken away...They were all hiding in the same house...it was the day before yesterday or the day before that,” the man, identified by his surname, Tang, said. “The family belongs to the second unit of the village.” A second resident of Yengiyer said: “I heard it was terrorists. But I am not very clear about this.” The raids come one week after several hundred ethnic Uyghurs staged protests following the death in custody of a prominent Uyghur businessman and philanthropist. Witnesses report protests at two locations in Khotan prefecture—in Khotan city March 23-24 and Qaraqash county March 23. Several hundred protesters were taken into custody, numerous sources said, and security remains tight. Numerous sources said the demonstrations followed the death in custody of a wealthy Uyghur jade trader and philanthropist, Mutallip Hajim, 38. Police returned his body to relatives March 3 after two months in custody, saying he had died in hospital of heart trouble. According to an authoritative source, police instructed the family to bury him immediately and inform no one of his death. |
| Posted by:ryuge |