Beijing, May 24 (Agency) Thousands of photographs from China’s highly secretive system of mass concentration camps in Xinjiang and the shoot-to-kill policy are among the huge cache of data that were hacked into from police computer servers in the region, as per report. According to Xinjiang Police Files, received by BBC earlier this year, data has revealed unprecedented detail of China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both. They also include classified speeches by senior officials; internal police manuals and personnel information; the internment details for more than 20,000 Uyghurs; and photographs from highly sensitive locations. BBC’s publication coincides with the arrival of United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet in China’s Xinjiang.
According to the government, the re-education camps in Xinjiang since 2017 are “schools”. However, this is in contradiction to the internal police instructions, guarding rosters and the images of detainees. Furthermore, its widespread use of terrorism charges, under which many thousands more have been swept into formal prisons, is exposed as a pretext for a parallel method of internment, with police spreadsheets full of arbitrary, draconian sentences, BBC reported. The documents have provided some strongest evidence of the policy targeting “almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith – and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping”. The hacked police files also contain over 5,000 police photographs of Uyghurs taken between January and July 2018.