Tursun Kaliolla, a Kazakh living in China’s Xinjiang, was detained and tortured to death after appealing to the government about inhuman treatment inflicted inside officially run reeducation camps, according to his family.

Kaliolla’s eldest son, Akikat, told Apple Daily that his father died in custody on Dec. 14, aged 71. Akikat disputed the official claim that coronary heart disease was the cause of death, because Kaliolla’s body was buried by distant relatives in the reeducation camp where he was kept, instead of being returned to his immediate family.

Since March 2018, Kaliolla had been helping fellow Kazakhs, a Turkic ethnic group in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, to write petitions and expose poor conditions in reeducation camps. He was later detained in a camp in Emin county and his family was informed verbally that he had been sentenced to 20 years in jail, according to Akikat.

When the family last saw him, Kaliolla had a urinary catheter inserted into him, Akikat said. He had lost consciousness and was unable to respond to their questions.

Akikat said his brother Parasat and their mother Verena Mukatay had also been detained in reeducation camps before. Parasat was beaten up inside, while Mukatay was classified as dangerous and blocked from talking to anyone in the camp. Both were later released and then placed under surveillance, he added.

Akikat moved to Kazakhstan in 2015 and has obtained Kazakh citizenship. In February, he met with United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alongside families of other Kazakhs being persecuted by China, and in June he protested in front of the Chinese embassy in Nur-Sultan, the capital city of Kazakhstan. The authorities later allowed him to contact his mother and brothers in Xinjiang, although he had not been able to contact them again since mid-August.

Separately, the central Chinese government is said to have laid claim since 1996 to pastures in Ili, northern Xinjiang, that Kazakh herders have been passing down from generation to generation.

Ili was an autonomous prefecture mainly occupied by Kazakhs with a small population of Mongols and Kirgiz people. The authorities had been using environmental protection as the reason to take over the land, sending many Kazakhs to reeducation camps in the process, Kazakh human rights activist Serikzhan Bilash told Apple Daily.

Kaliolla was the first Kazakh to criticize the authorities and expose what was happening in those camps, Bilash said. He also said that Beijing had been relocating large numbers of Han people to Xinjiang in recent years, taking away land that legally belonged to the Kazakhs without compensating them.

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