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A 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck Xinjiang’s Uchturpan county, which borders Kyrgyzstan, early Tuesday killed three, injured five, and displaced more than 12,400 people living in the area, Chinese authorities and Akqi officials said. Xinjiang emergency management authorities told Chinese state media at a press conference on Tuesday evening that the three who died in the quake, which struck at 2:09 a.m., were from Akqi county, just to the east of Uchturpan. An Akqi country police officer later told Radio Free Asia that the three were ethnic Kyrgyz. An official at…

China is the worst jailer of journalists in the world, a report by a New York-based watchdog said, and nearly half of the journalists behind bars in the country are Uyghurs who reported on the persecution of the mostly Muslim group in Xinjiang. In its 2023 prison census, conducted on Dec. 1, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, found that there was a spike in arrested journalists, with 320 believed to be behind bars – close to a record high. More than half of those jailed journalists were charged…

The U.S. State Department, lawmakers and human rights groups marked the 10th anniversary of jailed Uyghur academic and blogger Ilham Tohti’s arrest on Monday with renewed calls for China to release him, while his daughter urged Beijing to provide proof that he remains alive. An outspoken economics professor who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Tohti was arrested on Jan. 15, 2014. While teaching, he regularly highlighted the religious and cultural persecution of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He was…

The Chinese government has thrown open the door for tourists to Xinjiang. Or at least those it deems worthy of an invite.  While officials previously let in diplomats, journalists and those considered “friends of China,” they are now presenting the restive far-western region as a tourist destination of sorts in a bid to remove some of the tarnish from China’s image as a human rights violator in the far-western region in the eyes of the international community. Nearly 400 delegations and groups consisting of more than 4,300 people from various…

A Uyghur crane operator who had once been arrested for pursuing Islamic studies at a madrasa in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture is now in jail after he was suddenly detained again in May, RFA Uyghur has learned. 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. In the months since, authorities provided no information on his whereabouts or the reason for…

The recent retraction of an academic journal article that discussed the genetic information of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region has raised questions and concerns about ethical standards in scientific research, as people familiar with the study believe that genetic samples were obtained under duress. In June, Elsevier, a Dutch publisher, announced the retraction of a scientific article published in 2019 in its journal “Forensic Science International: Genetics.” The retraction was attributed to the failure to meet necessary ethical approvals in scientific research, The Guardian reported. The deleted…

An ethnic Kazakh who was imprisoned in Xinjiang, in far-western China, and fled to Kazakhstan in 2019 to seek asylum, was attacked by four unknown men on Dec. 22 after eating a meal with his brother in a restaurant in Almaty, the country’s largest city, he told Radio Free Asia. Kaster Musakhan, 34, who was left with multiple injuries, said he didn’t know his assailants, but suspects they beat him for speaking out about how Chinese authorities repressed Muslims in Xinjiang.  “Someone I didn’t know grabbed my hand and struck…

China says that 456,000 people were newly employed during the first 10 months of the year in its far-western Xinjiang region, evidence it said showed that Beijing was successfully promoting economic development to create a “happy and harmonious” Uyghur society. Authorities are seeking “full employment” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or XUAR, as a key economic strategy to alleviate poverty, the Chinese-controlled Tengritagh Network said on Dec. 25. “Employment signifies a stable source of income, and a stable source of income paves the way for the desire to consume,”…

Beijing has sanctioned Kharon, a U.S.-based company that helps businesses comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods made using forced labor in China’s far-west. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Tuesday the sanctions were a “countermeasure” to hit back at sanctions imposed on Dec. 8 by the United States against two Chinese officials for their role in “serious human rights abuses” against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.  “In accordance with China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, we will take countermeasures against American intelligence data company…

When Nuraxun Rozi visited his teenage son who was studying in Egypt in 2015, little did he know his trip abroad, including a stop in Turkey, would later land him a 20-year prison sentence in Xinjiang. “At the end of December 2015, my father came for a trip to Egypt,” said Nureli Nuraxun, now 22 and an engineer at an aluminum factory in Turkey.  “He stayed there for a week and traveled in Turkey for another week, then went back home,” Nureli told Radio Free Asia. “After he went back,…