China widens crackdown on Muslims

According to a person present at a Communist party meeting discussing the crackdown, Urumqi’s prisons are full and newly arrested people are being held in a People’s Liberation Army warehouse.

Armed police have established checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of Urumqi. This week all vehicles were being stopped and all passengers on long-distance buses leaving Urumqi had to disembark for identity checks.

Private cars without Uighur passengers were waved through after a quick document check for the drivers.

Vehicles with Uighur drivers or with Uighur passengers were being searched at gunpoint.

A source who receives regular briefings on the security procedures said: “It may have been possible for Uighurs to get out of Urumqi on the same day but now no one is going to slip through the net.”

The regional government warned at the weekend that Uighurs could try to take hostages and then demand that they be exchanged for members of their ethnic group.

Security is also tight beyond the regional capital. Armed police were stopping vehicles at motorway entrances and exits, toll stations and entrances and exits of towns and cities between Urumqi and Kashgar, which is south-west of the capital.

Several rural counties in Xinjiang, which the government suspects to be the home of most Uighurs involved in the riot, have been closed off entirely.

On Sunday thousands of ethnic Uighurs rallied in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to protest against the crackdown on Uighurs in China. FT

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