As many as 20 Uyghur teachers from a university in northwestern China’s Xinjiang province have been arrested, a media report said.
These 20 Uyghur teachers include the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary of the school’s Marxism Institute, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported citing a source in Ghulja town.
A total of six educators, including Abdullah Ismail of the Marxism Institute, is being held in detention. Abdullah Ismail was abducted in 2018 and charged with being “two-faced.”
According to RFA, the CCP uses the term to describe an official or party member who is either corrupt or ideologically disloyal to the party.
Ismail was well-liked in high school, said Parhat Kadir, Abdullah Ismail’s former high school classmate who is the former chairman of the Dutch East Turkistan Uyghur Union.
“Abdullah was my classmate from first to 10th grade,” he told RFA. “He was an honest and hardworking kid.”
Abdullah Ismail was born in 1962 in Ghulja’s Suidong township. He was admitted to the Literature Department of the Ili Pedagogical University in 1981.
Ismail published research papers on Marxist theory in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Ili Gazette.
According to RFA, Ismail later was included on the list of suspicious persons in 2017 when China stepped up its crackdown on Uyghurs.
The report added that he was charged with several criminal charges, though the source did not name them.