Arrests Increased in Muslim Region of China
The International Herald Tribune has more on reports that the number of arrests for state security crimes in Xinjiang made a large jump last year:
The official newspaper, the Procuratorial Daily, which is published by the Chinese equivalent of the attorney general’s office, said that prosecutors in Xinjiang approved 1,295 arrests of individuals and indicted 1,154 of them. In total, there were 204 cases that were opened. The newspaper article was also posted on a Xinjiang government Web site, lending legitimacy to the statistics.
In 2007, the number of people arrested across all of China on suspicion of endangering state security was 742, according to government statistics. Prosecutors indicted 619 of them.
Of those total numbers, about half were from Xinjiang, said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, citing statistics from the Xinjiang Yearbook, a government publication of regional statistics. So the numbers reported on Sunday by the official newspaper are a vast increase over the numbers from 2007.
