09 August 2013 :

A Uyghur teacher sentenced to life in prison for “anti-state” activities in China’s troubled Xinjiang region has died in mysterious circumstances after serving 16 years of his term, a friend living in exile says.
Perhat Mollahun, 49, collapsed last week after being taken on a work detail and was brought to a hospital where he later died, longtime friend Behtiyar Nasir told RFA’s Uyghur Service.
“The police informed his family of his death on August 3,” said Nasir, who lives in the Netherlands.
“However, they had never been told he had suffered any illnesses in jail,” he said.
Mollahun, a middle-school teacher in Qorghas county in the Ili prefecture of the far northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, was arrested in 1998 during a countywide roundup of young Uyghurs suspected of engaging in activities aimed at “overthrowing state authority,” Nasir said.
Charged with involvement in the killing of a township official, Mollahun was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in a closed trial held in January 1999, but the sentence was later commuted to life.
Seven other Uyghurs, including another teacher, Abdushukur Nurulla, were sentenced to death that same year, with Nurulla executed almost immediately, Nasir said.
The jailings and sentences came almost two years after Chinese security forces opened fire on Uyghur protesters in Ili prefecture’s capital city Ghulja on February 5, 1997, killing an unknown number.
Though Mollahun was held at No. 1 Jail in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi for an unknown period after his sentencing, it is not clear where he was confined at the time of his death.