Uyghur Activist Executed in China

By RADIO FREE ASIA
February 08, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8—Chinese authorities in the far-west city of Urumqi today executed an ethnic Uyghur man for allegedly attempting to “split the [Chinese] motherland.”

“The execution was carried out at 9 a.m.,” Ismail Semed’s widow, Buhejer, told RFA’s Uyghur service. “They gave his body to us at the cemetery. Some of his relatives and friends joined us. When the body was transferred to us at the cemetery I saw only one bullet hole in his heart.”

Semed, a Uyghur political activist deported to China from Pakistan in 2003, was sentenced to death Oct. 31, 2005, by the Urumqi City Intermediate People’s Court for “attempting to split the motherland” and “possessing firearms and explosives,” according to Uyghur sources.

“The authorities informed us about the decision to execute him Monday afternoon,” she said. “They allowed us met him just for 10 minutes on Monday. He said, ‘What can I do, it's my fate… Please take care of our children, and let them get a good education.”
get a good education.”

Semed's widow:
“[It was] only for 10 minutes, we didn’t have too much time to talk…There were several of us. Previously, he had said his leg hurt, and his stomach hurt, and other parts of his body hurt, and that he needed medicine,” she said.

Confession said to be coerced
At trial, she said, Semed told the court his confession was coerced. "They forced me," she quoted him as saying. The Semeds have a young son and daughter, whose ages were not immediately available.

No comment was immediately available from Chinese officials.

Two other Uyghurs—a majority Muslim people with ethnic ties to the Turkic populations of Central Asia—had testified against him: Osman Hamit and Memet Rahmat. Both have since been executed, according to sources in the region.

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