Mick Hartley

From the Times:

A former Chinese detective turned whistleblower has spoken about his involvement in the abuse of Uighur Muslims detained in Beijing’s sprawling internment camp system in Xinjiang.

The man, identified as Jiang, who is in exile in Europe, described how he was ordered to hang men, women and children from the ceiling and torture them. He was told to beat, sexually assault and electrocute detainees, and use waterboarding to force confessions of terrorist acts.

None of them had committed a crime, he told Ivan Watson in a three-hour interview on CNN, and all were detained in mass arrests, underscoring accusations about the arbitrary nature of Beijing’s campaign of persecution.

“They are ordinary people,” he told CNN. “We took [them] all forcibly overnight. If there were hundreds of people in one county in this area, then you had to arrest hundreds of people.”

Beijing’s detention of up to two million Uighurs and its persecution of the minority has been condemned around the world as a gross violation of human rights. China denies the accusations.

Jiang said he believed initially that he was defending his country against an extremist threat but quickly became horrified by the violence. “Some people [officers] see this as a job, some are just psychopaths,” he said.

See the CNN piece with the Jiang interview here.