Chinese Foreign Ministry Rejects CNN Whistleblower's Allegations of Uyghur Torture

BEIJING (Sputnik) - The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday called a former Chinese police detective, who spoke of the alleged torture of Uyghurs in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a liar.

"A lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie. Despite the fact that these clowns try their best, the audience for this farce is small, as well as those who respond to this lie. This is sufficient evidence that the international community no longer believes in false information spread by them and even began to feel disgust and dislike for it", Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at the briefing.

The spokesman suggested that that the alleged former policeman in question, identified as Jiang, had previously impersonated a policeman named Wang, who was sent to Xinjiang in 2018 to investigate separatist activities.

"The man, claiming to be an ex-police sent to investigate separatist activities in Xinjiang in 2018, has spread a large amount of disinformation on Xinjiang. This man changed his identity in a CNN report and gave himself the surname Jiang. Even CNN admits that it cannot unilaterally verify his statement", the diplomat added.

On October 5, an alleged former PRC law enforcement official who fled to Europe reported "a systematic campaign of torture against ethnic Uyghurs" in an interview with CNN. The whistleblower said that hundreds of police officers armed with rifles went door-to-door in Uyghur communities, dragging people out of their homes, handcuffing them and threatening to shoot them if they resisted. According to him, the interrogations of men, women and teenagers were accompanied by battery and severe torture.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the largest province in China, home to about 25 million people from various ethnic groups, but about 43% of whom are Uyghurs, a Muslim population. The US has previously stated that China's actions against the Uyghurs can be regarded as "genocide." China flatly denies the assertion.

In late August 2018, experts from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reported that up to 1 million ethnic Uyghurs may be in "re-education camps" in Xinjiang. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the information is not confirmed by anything and does not correspond to reality. Chinese authorities argue that the problems associated with Xinjiang are not at all a human rights matter, but are related to the issues of violence, terrorism and separatism.