Muslim ethnic Uighur women in the internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region have been subjected to systematic rape, sexual abuse and torture, BBC reported earlier on Wednesday.
Several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they “experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.”
The United States is “deeply disturbed” by reports on atrocities committed there, the US State Department said on Wednesday.
“We are deeply disturbed by reports, including first-hand testimony, of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang,” a State Department spokeswoman told Aljazeera TV.
He added that US charges that China has committed “crimes against humanity and genocide” in Xinjiang
“These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences,” he added
The official demands China should allow “immediate and independent investigations by international observers” into the rape allegations and other atrocities being committed in Xinjiang.”
On Wednesday, BBC has documented in details how Muslim women in China camps are being raped and tortured.
“Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a “black room”, where there were no surveillance cameras,” one of the newly released detainee told BBC.
Tursunay Ziawudun who has spent nine months inside China’s network of internment camps, said several nights they took her.
“Perhaps this is the most unforgettable scar on me forever.
“I don’t even want these words to spill from my mouth,” she said.
Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was detained for 18 months in the camp system, also told BBC she was forced to strip Uighur women naked and handcuff them, before leaving them alone with Chinese men.
“My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they cannot move.
“Then I would leave the women in the room and a man would enter – some Chinese man from outside or policeman. I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left the room I took the woman for a shower,” said Gulzira Auelkhan.
Asked if there was a system of organised rape, she said: “Yes, rape.”
Some of the women who were taken away from the cells at night were never returned, the report said.
You can’t tell anyone what happened, you can only lie down quietly. Women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by masked Chinese men, Tursunay Ziawudun said.
However, Beijing denies accusations of abuse in Xinjiang, and has said the camps provided vocational training to help stamp out Islamist extremism and separatism.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the BBC report was “wholly without factual basis” and charged that the people interviewed for it had been “proved multiple times” to be “actors disseminating false information.” -Malaysia World News
