A well-known Uyghur entrepreneur who set up an international trading company in Xinjiang is serving a life sentence for his alleged involvement with extremists abroad, people with knowledge of the situation told RFA Uyghur.
Ablikim Kurban, who would now be about 46 years old, established the Xinjiang Siyadan International Trade Co. in Urumqi in April 2017 and began selling imported sesame seeds.
Prior to setting up his business, Kurban had visited factories and companies in Egypt. While there, he also met with Uyghur students from his hometown of Kumul, called Hami in Chinese, who were attending Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
Muslim-majority Egypt is among several countries blacklisted by Chinese authorities for travel by Uyghurs because of a perceived threat of religious extremism.
Chinese authorities pointed to Kurban's trip and his alleged involvement with “terrorists” as the reason for his arrest on July 8, 2017, a Xinjiang police officer and a security chief on the neighborhood committee where Kurban previously lived in Kumul told RFA.
Relatives said they still don’t know his whereabouts.
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Kurban was one of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs arrested during China’s roundup and mass detentions of Muslims in “re-education” camps across Xinjiang, which began around 2017, in the name of fighting terrorism and religious extremism.
Uyghurs like Kurban who traveled to other Muslim-majority countries were especially at risk of being detained on unproven grounds that they had been in contact with what Chinese authorities claimed were terrorists or extremists.
A police officer who is based in Kumul’s Taranchi coal mine district, where Kurban used to work, told Radio Free Asia that authorities detained him in 2017 because of his trip to Egypt.
“They didn’t tell us the reason prior to his arrest, we only learned about it after he was arrested,” she said.
“He was arrested for getting involved with an extremist organization in Egypt,” she said, adding that the information came from state security police.
During Kurban's visit to Egypt, Chinese authorities ordered Uyghur students enrolled in schools there and in other countries, including Turkey, France, Australia and the United States, to return to their hometowns in Xinjiang for "registration."
In some cases, authorities held parents hostage by locking them up until their children returned, and some students who did go back disappeared or were jailed, sources in Xinjiang and Egypt told RFA in a May 2017 report.
Authorities in Egypt collaborated with Chinese authorities to round up scores of Uyghur students — many of them studying religion at Al-Azhar — and detain and deport them, according to the report.
A resident of the Taranchi coal mine district told RFA that Kurban was focused on his business and his family and had no interest in politics.
The resident, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said authorities also arrested Kurban’s wife, Gulshan Tohti, a month after detaining him, leaving a grandmother to care for the couple’s three children.
Tohti was released in August 2023, though it is unknown what she was charged with and whether she spent six years of detainment in an internment camp or prison.
Kurban initially followed in his father's footsteps after graduating from high school and became a miner in Taranchi, which is in eastern Xinjiang.
He had greater ambitions though, and in the early 2000s he founded a factory in Kumul that produced plastic doors and windows, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in his hometown.
In 2015, Kurban decided to shift his business to food imports. But his arrest and detention in 2017 cut his plans short, and Xinjiang Siyadan International Trade was shut down.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Jim Snyder.