China arrested nine Muslim Uighurs and 10 Turkish nationals in November over a fake passport plot, state media report.<\/p>\n
14 January 2015 Last updated at 06:49 ET<\/p>\n
China arrested nine Muslim Uighurs and 10 Turkish nationals in November over a fake passport plot, state media report.<\/p>\n
The Global Times said the Turks gave illegal passports to the Uighurs, who attempted to leave China.<\/p>\n
Some of the Uighurs’ phones contained “terrorist” material, the paper said, and several confessed they were heading for Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Chinese authorities say they are fighting an Islamist rebellion in Xinjiang, the Uighurs’ home region.<\/p>\n
More than 200 people died last year in bloody confrontations between Uighurs and Chinese security forces, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens executed.<\/p>\n
Information about incidents in the region is tightly controlled.<\/p>\n
Activists say authorities have increasingly repressed the Uighurs, fuelling resentment.<\/p>\n
The Turkish embassy in Beijing and the police in Shanghai would not verify the latest story and it was not immediately clear why the information had just emerged.<\/p>\n
But the Global Times said the passport-selling scheme had been in progress for months.<\/p>\n
Each person paid 60,000 yuan (\u00a36,380; $9,680) for forged and altered passports provided to them by the Turks, who had entered China legally, it said.<\/p>\n
One of the Uighurs arrested was a known terror suspect who had “on several occasions in the past broadcast transmissions that fanned ethnic hatred and discrimination in Xinjiang”, the paper said.<\/p>\n
Dozens of civilians were killed in attacks across China apparently linked to the unrest in Xinjiang. The authorities have blamed Uighur separatists.<\/p>\n
News of the arrests comes two days after local media reported that Xinjiang police had shot dead six people who were allegedly trying to detonate a bomb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China arrested nine Muslim Uighurs and 10 Turkish nationals in November over a fake passport plot, state media report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}