Uighur scholar and mother seized by Chinese police, says website

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/uighur-scholar-mother-chinese-police-ilham-tohti

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Chinese police have taken an Uighur scholar and his mother from their home in Beijing, a website connected to the professor said on Wednesday.

Ilham Tohti, 45, is known for pressing the rights of the Uighur ethnic minority in Xinjiang and for questioning state policies in the troubled north-west region, where scores have died in unrest over the last year.

The Uighurbiz.net website said police seized Tohti and his mother between 3pm and 4pm local time on Wednesday, citing a phone call from his wife. The site, which is hosted overseas, was inaccessible on Wednesday evening.

Tohti's wife said officers had not gone through any formalities or stated the basis for his detention. She added that she and the couple's two children were being kept in their home, that all means of communication had been confiscated and that police from Xinjiang as well as Beijing were monitoring them. The author of the Uighurbiz.net report said Uighur officers could be overheard in the background during the call, which she was able to make via a relative's phone.

Tohti could not be reached by phone. Beijing police said they could respond only to faxed queries.

Tohti, who lectures on economics at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, has been an outspoken commentator on Uighur issues.

In 2009 he spent more than a month in detention after violent ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, left about 200 people dead and many more injured. In February 2011 he was detained at Beijing airport and prevented from taking up a fellowship in the US.

In November last year, he alleged that security agents had rammed his car, telling him that they wanted to stop him speaking to foreign media.

He told the New York Times that when he pointed to his children in the back seat, the men said: "We don't care ... we want to kill your whole family."

He added: "The more they threaten me, the more important it is for me to speak up."

Uighurs make up almost half the population of Xinjiang, but many are angered by cultural and religious restrictions, and complain that have been marginalised by Han migration. Some seek an independent state for what they call East Turkestan.

Authorities have been particularly concerned by a recent upsurge in violence in the region. Last month Chinese police said they had shot eight dead in what they described as a terrorist attack near Kashgar. In October, a Uighur man crashed a car containing his wife and mother into a crowd at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, killing all three of them and two tourists. An Islamist group later claimed responsibility though other sources had suggested the driver might have been angered by a raid on a mosque in his hometown.

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