Prisoners Tortured, Drugged, Killed by Injection in Xinjiang ‘Re-Education Camps,’ Ex-Inmate Reveals
The Epochtimes, 13 December 2018
By Isabel Van Brugen Uyghur women detained in China’s so-called “vocational training centers” are being psychologically and physically tortured, poisoned, and killed by injection, a former detainee has told The Epoch Times.
Uyghur and Kazakhstan national Gulbakhar Jalilova, 54, said she witnessed the atrocities during her 15-month internment in an all-female camp in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi before she was released in September.
“There were girls from my room who passed out from being beaten so hard, and had nails put into their fingers to make blood pour out,” she told The Epoch Times in a phone interview from Istanbul, Turkey.
Gulbakhar, a businesswoman who was detained in May 2017, was accused of transferring $17,000 to a company called Nur. She was released after being found innocent.
While detained, her fellow inmate named Horiyat was “put to sleep … she was killed by injection.”
“She was injected but her body was still warm, and other girls were ordered to wash her body. She just died like that in front of me,” Gulbakhar explained.
The alarming reports come after Xinjiang authorities moved to legalize the detention facilities in October, saying they were to “educate and transform” those whom the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deems at risk of the “three evil forces” of “extremism, separatism, and terrorism.”
Uyghurs, alongside other ethnic minorities like the Tibetans, as well as religious believers who remain outside state control, including house Christians and Falun Gong, have long been targeted by the ruling CCP for transformation through “re-education.”
At a U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing on Nov. 29, Sen. Marco Rubio said many observers believe the current wave of repression in China is the “the most severe since the cultural revolution.”
But Beijing has continued to push its narrative that what were secret mass detention centers until October are actually facilities for further education in “vocational skills” such as baking and sewing—a claim that goes against multiple testimonies of former detainees, including Gulbakhar’s.
China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, told Reuters last month the CCP is trying to “re-educate” Uyghurs to try to “turn them into normal persons (who) can go back to normal life.”
Gulbakhar told The Epoch Times she “never saw a single classroom” while detained and the education claims are “complete lies.”