“China Uighurs: A Model’s Video Gives a Rare Glimpse inside Internment”, 2020-08-04 ():
As a model for the massive Chinese online retailer Taobao, the 31-year-old was well paid to flaunt his good looks in slick promotional videos for clothing brands. But one video of Mr Ghappar is different. Instead of a glitzy studio or fashionable city street, the backdrop is a bare room with grubby walls and steel mesh on the window. And in place of the posing, Mr Ghappar sits silently with an anxious expression on his face. Holding the camera with his right hand, he reveals his dirty clothes, his swollen ankles, and a set of handcuffs fixing his left wrist to the metal frame of the bed—the only piece of furniture in the room.
The video of Mr Ghappar, along with a number of accompanying text messages also passed to the BBC, together provide a chilling and extremely rare first-hand account of China’s highly secure and secretive detention system—sent directly from the inside.
…Written via the Chinese social media app WeChat, he explains that he was first kept in a police jail in Kucha. “I saw 50 to 60 people detained in a small room no bigger than 50 square metres, men on the right, women on the left”, he writes. “Everyone was wearing a so-called ‘four-piece-suit’, a black head sack, handcuffs, leg shackles and an iron chain connecting the cuffs to the shackles.” China’s use of these combined hand and leg cuffs has been criticised in the past by human rights groups. Mr Ghappar was made to wear the device and, joining his fellow inmates in a caged-off area covering around two-thirds of the cell, he found there was no room to lie down and sleep. “I lifted the sack on my head and told the police officer that the handcuffs were so tight they hurt my wrists”, he writes in one of the text messages. “He shouted fiercely at me, saying ‘If you remove your hood again, I will beat you to death’. And after that I dared not to talk”, he adds. “Dying here is the last thing I want.” He writes about the constant sound of screaming, coming from elsewhere in the jail. “Interrogation rooms”, he suggested…“One time I heard a man screaming from morning until evening”, he says…“My whole body is covered in lice. Every day I catch them and pick them off from my body—it’s so itchy”, he writes.