A Uyghur refugee from China’s Xinjiang region has died of alleged police neglect this month at the Bangkok Immigration Detention Center, reported the Washington-based VOA News, adding that the death has raised concerns about the treatment of the more than 50 Uyghur refugees who have been held at the centre since 2014.
As per the news report, the victim has been identified as Abdulaziz Abdullah. His son, Muhammad Abdullah, who lives in Kayseri, Turkey, said that his family had fled Xinjiang due to the oppression and repeated arrests of his father. He said that Chinese police would arrest his father every year since 2009, as per the VOA News report.
“The Chinese police would arrest my father every year since 2009 whenever they started a Strike Hard [anti-terrorism] campaign,” VOA quoted Muhammad Abdullah as saying. He added, “My father was a street fruit vendor in Urumqi. When the oppression was almost unbearable, my parents decided to leave the country and took us to Thailand.”
China has been accused of mistreating Uyghurs. In August last year, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that there was credible evidence that China had committed “grave human rights abuses” against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang, including arbitrary detention, torture, forced sterilization, and cultural and religious erasure, as per the news report