An Uyghur woman was sentenced to 14 years in prison for giving Islamic instruction to children in her neighborhood and hiding copies of the Quran after being seized in the middle of the night in China’s Xinjiang region more than four years ago. Hasiyet Ehmet, a 57-year-old woman from Manas (Manasi) county in Xinjiang’s Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture, has been missing since May 2017. A source familiar with the situation told RFA’s (Radio Free Asia) Uyghur Service that she had been sentenced to 14 years in prison — seven for teaching the Quran and giving religious lessons to local children, and another seven for hiding two copies of the sacred text during a period when police began confiscating religious books from Manas county residents. Before transporting Hasiyet away, Chinese officers from the county’s No. 3 police station entered her home and put a black hood over her head, ignoring her pleas to change her clothes or fetch her medicine. According to RFA (Radio Free Asia), Chinese authorities have been targeting and arresting Uyghur businessmen, intellectuals, cultural and religious figures in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for years as part of a campaign to monitor, control, and assimilate members of the minority group in order to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities. In Xinjiang, 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have been detained in a network of detention centers since 2017.
