NB: There seems to be Sino-Indian unity on torturing the innocent. DS
Arrested in 2013 on India’s Himalayan border after fleeing Beijing’s ‘genocide’ against Muslims in Xinjiang, the siblings have been imprisoned indefinitely ever since then
On the evening of 12 June 2013, according to court documents, three “Chinese intruders” were arrested by the Indian army in Sultan Chusku, a remote and uninhabited desert area in the mountainous northern region of Ladakh. The three Thursun brothers – Adil, 23, Abdul Khaliq, 22 and Salamu, 20 – had found themselves in an area of unmarked and disputed borders after a 13-day journey by bus and foot over the rugged Himalayan terrain through China’s Xinjiang province, which borders Ladakh.
The men told army officials that they had fled their family home near the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang after the Chinese authorities intensified their crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and took several of their relatives into detention centres.
More than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang appear to have been imprisoned in “re-education” camps and subjected to torture over the past decade for just attending a mosque or wearing a hijab. China says it is tackling extremism through “controlling illegal religious activities” and “vocational education and training centres”, but other countries, including the US, have said its actions amount to genocide.
After two months of interrogation by the military, the brothers were handed over to local police to face charges of illegally crossing the border. But what followed was a bureaucratic nightmare that continues to this day. Unable to communicate in any Indian language, the three men struggled to navigate the legal system. Their court-appointed lawyer faced similar barriers. Only after a year in detention, during which they gradually learned the local language from fellow inmates, could they answer the judge’s questions.
They were each sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. But their trauma did not end there.
By the time of their conviction, they had already spent a year in prison and were expected to walk free within six months. But India’s political landscape was shifting. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, led by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, had come to power.
When their sentence expired, instead of releasing them, the authorities invoked the Public Safety Act, a controversial detention law that allows someone to be held for six months, renewable for up to two years. According to the detention orders, which authorities keep reissuing, the three men would remain imprisoned indefinitely, pending the government’s decision on their release or deportation to China.
Their only support has come from their lawyer, Muhammad Shafi Lassu, who met them as part of a regular court-appointed delegation visiting the prison and who could not believe they continued to be jailed for nothing more than unlawfully crossing into India. “They said they were frightened of being sent to one of the detention centres [in China] and simply wanted to escape. They didn’t even know they were crossing into India,” he says.
For the past decade Shafi has been fighting for their release on a pro bono basis, but the Indian government remains unmoved. The three men have been transferred between prisons several times and are now in the city of Karnal, in the Indian state of Haryana, near Delhi….
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