Missing Uyghur detainee confirmed jailed for Islamic studies 11 years ago

Ebuzer Abbas, 24, was arrested at his home in the county-level city of Ghulja’s Kepekyuzi Ara Mehelle district, according to his cousin, Nureli Nuraxun, a resident of Turkey who works as an engineer in an aluminum factory.
The Uyghur crane operator who had once been arrested for pursuing Islamic studies at a madrasa in East Turkistan is now in jail after he was suddenly detained again in May, RFA Uyghur has learned.
An official from Kepekyuzi, who declined to be named, told RFA that Abbas was suspected of “attempting to divide the country” due to his involvement in “illegal religious activities.”
The official said in a phone interview that the classification of these religious activities as “illegal” stemmed from his attendance at a madrasa, or school for Islamic studies, in a community mosque 11 years earlier, at the age of 13.
Confidential documents hacked from East Turkistan police computers known as the Xinjiang Police Files indicate that authorities arrested numerous individuals for learning to read the Quran from their family members 10 to 20 years ago.
The files, which contain the personal records of some 830,000 individuals, were obtained by a third party and published in May 2022. They provide inside information on Beijing’s internment of up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan in 2017 and 2018 – the height of one of China’s “strike hard” campaigns.
The records are further evidence of Beijing’s human rights abuses in East Turkistan, which the Chinese government has repeatedly denied.
According to the official in Kepekyuzi, Abbas’s “illegal activities” were uncovered in 2017, but he wasn’t arrested at the time because he was still a minor.
The official said that Abbas was arrested last year along with other youths from the area during a police operation targeting “off-the-grid suspects.”
Investigation by RFA Uyghur found that more than 10 youths, including a young man named Zulyar Yasin, were arrested in the East Turkistan capital Urumqi for having previously studied in Turkey. The youths had not been targeted during the mass arrests of 2017 because they were under the age of 18 at the time.
However, a police officer at an internment camp in Kashgar’s prefecture’s Toqquzaq city recently disclosed that the facility housed individuals between the ages of 14 and 80, suggesting that beginning in 2017, officials in East Turkistan made determinations on who to arrest according to their own discretion, or disregarded age limits in order to satisfy detention quotas.
https://www.rfa.org/