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By Nicole Perlroth | The New York Times

31 January 2013

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times's network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen's relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times's South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

"Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied," said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware -- malicious software -- that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times's network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times's newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China's Ministry of National Defense said, "Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security." It added that "to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless."

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees' computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company's internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China's vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that "no computer systems or computers were compromised."

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China's public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

Security experts said that beginning in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting Western journalists as part of an effort to identify and intimidate their sources and contacts, and to anticipate stories that might damage the reputations of Chinese leaders.

In a December intelligence report for clients, Mandiant said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a "short list" of journalists whose accounts they repeatedly attack.

While computer security experts say China is most active and persistent, it is not alone in using computer attacks for a variety of national purposes, including corporate espionage. The United States, Israel, Russia and Iran, among others, are suspected of developing and deploying cyberweapons.

The United States and Israel have never publicly acknowledged it, but evidence indicates they released a sophisticated computer worm starting around 2008 that attacked and later caused damage at Iran's main nuclear enrichment plant. Iran is believed to have responded with computer attacks on targets in the United States, including American banks and foreign oil companies.

Russia is suspected of having used computer attacks during its war with Georgia in 2008.

The following account of the attack on The Times -- which is based on interviews with Times executives, reporters and security experts -- provides a glimpse into one such spy campaign.

After The Times learned of warnings from Chinese government officials that its investigation of the wealth of Mr. Wen's relatives would "have consequences," executives on Oct. 24 asked AT&T, which monitors The Times's computer network, to watch for unusual activity.

On Oct. 25, the day the article was published online, AT&T informed The Times that it had noticed behavior that was consistent with other attacks believed to have been perpetrated by the Chinese military.

The Times notified and voluntarily briefed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the attacks and then -- not initially recognizing the extent of the infiltration of its computers -- worked with AT&T to track the attackers even as it tried to eliminate them from its systems.

But on Nov. 7, when it became clear that attackers were still inside its systems despite efforts to expel them, The Times hired Mandiant, which specializes in responding to security breaches. Since learning of the attacks, The Times -- first with AT&T and then with Mandiant -- has monitored attackers as they have moved around its systems.

Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m. Beijing time. Usually they continued for a standard work day, but sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason was not clear.

Investigators still do not know how hackers initially broke into The Times's systems. They suspect the hackers used a so-called spear-phishing attack, in which they send e-mails to employees that contain malicious links or attachments. All it takes is one click on the e-mail by an employee for hackers to install "remote access tools" -- or RATs. Those tools can siphon off oceans of data -- passwords, keystrokes, screen images, documents and, in some cases, recordings from computers' microphones and Web cameras -- and send the information back to the attackers' Web servers.

Michael Higgins, chief security officer at The Times, said: "Attackers no longer go after our firewall. They go after individuals. They send a malicious piece of code to your e-mail account and you're opening it and letting them in."

Lying in Wait

Once hackers get in, it can be hard to get them out. In the case of a 2011 breach at the United States Chamber of Commerce, for instance, the trade group worked closely with the F.B.I. to seal its systems, according to chamber employees. But months later, the chamber discovered that Internet-connected devices -- a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments and a printer in its offices -- were still communicating with computers in China.

In part to prevent that from happening, The Times allowed hackers to spin a digital web for four months to identify every digital back door the hackers used. It then replaced every compromised computer and set up new defenses in hopes of keeping hackers out.

"Attackers target companies for a reason -- even if you kick them out, they will try to get back in," said Nick Bennett, the security consultant who has managed Mandiant's investigation. "We wanted to make sure we had full grasp of the extent of their access so that the next time they try to come in, we can respond quickly."

Based on a forensic analysis going back months, it appears the hackers broke into The Times computers on Sept. 13, when the reporting for the Wen articles was nearing completion. They set up at least three back doors into users' machines that they used as a digital base camp. From there they snooped around The Times's systems for at least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee.

While hashes make hackers' break-ins more difficult, hashed passwords can easily be cracked using so-called rainbow tables -- readily available databases of hash values for nearly every alphanumeric character combination, up to a certain length. Some hacker Web sites publish as many as 50 billion hash values.

Investigators found evidence that the attackers cracked the passwords and used them to gain access to a number of computers. They created custom software that allowed them to search for and grab Mr. Barboza's and Mr. Yardley's e-mails and documents from a Times e-mail server.

Over the course of three months, attackers installed 45 pieces of custom malware. The Times -- which uses antivirus products made by Symantec -- found only one instance in which Symantec identified an attacker's software as malicious and quarantined it, according to Mandiant.

A Symantec spokesman said that, as a matter of policy, the company does not comment on its customers.

The attackers were particularly active in the period after the Oct. 25 publication of The Times article about Mr. Wen's relatives, especially on the evening of the Nov. 6 presidential election. That raised concerns among Times senior editors who had been informed of the attacks that the hackers might try to shut down the newspaper's electronic or print publishing system. But the attackers' movements suggested that the primary target remained Mr. Barboza's e-mail correspondence.

"They could have wreaked havoc on our systems," said Marc Frons, the Times's chief information officer. "But that was not what they were after."

What they appeared to be looking for were the names of people who might have provided information to Mr. Barboza.

Mr. Barboza's research on the stories, as reported previously in The Times, was based on public records, including thousands of corporate documents through China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce. Those documents -- which are available to lawyers and consulting firms for a nominal fee -- were used to trace the business interests of relatives of Mr. Wen.

A Tricky Search

Tracking the source of an attack to one group or country can be difficult because hackers usually try to cloak their identities and whereabouts.

To run their Times spying campaign, the attackers used a number of compromised computer systems registered to universities in North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and New Mexico, as well as smaller companies and Internet service providers across the United States, according to Mandiant's investigators.

The hackers also continually switched from one I.P. address to another; an I.P. address, for Internet protocol, is a unique number identifying each Internet-connected device from the billions around the globe, so that messages and other information sent by one device are correctly routed to the ones meant to get them.

Using university computers as proxies and switching I.P. addresses were simply efforts to hide the source of the attacks, which investigators say is China. The pattern that Mandiant's experts detected closely matched the pattern of earlier attacks traced to China. After Google was attacked in 2010 and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were opened, for example, investigators were able to trace the source to two educational institutions in China, including one with ties to the Chinese military.

Security experts say that by routing attacks through servers in other countries and outsourcing attacks to skilled hackers, the Chinese military maintains plausible deniability.

"If you look at each attack in isolation, you can't say, 'This is the Chinese military,' " said Richard Bejtlich, Mandiant's chief security officer.

But when the techniques and patterns of the hackers are similar, it is a sign that the hackers are the same or affiliated.

"When you see the same group steal data on Chinese dissidents and Tibetan activists, then attack an aerospace company, it starts to push you in the right direction," he said.

Mandiant has been tracking about 20 groups that are spying on organizations inside the United States and around the globe. Its investigators said that based on the evidence -- the malware used, the command and control centers compromised and the hackers' techniques -- The Times was attacked by a group of Chinese hackers that Mandiant refers to internally as "A.P.T. Number 12."

A.P.T. stands for Advanced Persistent Threat, a term that computer security experts and government officials use to describe a targeted attack and that many say has become synonymous with attacks done by China. AT&T and the F.B.I. have been tracking the same group, which they have also traced to China, but they use their own internal designations.

Mandiant said the group had been "very active" and had broken into hundreds of other Western organizations, including several American military contractors.

To get rid of the hackers, The Times blocked the compromised outside computers, removed every back door into its network, changed every employee password and wrapped additional security around its systems.

For now, that appears to have worked, but investigators and Times executives say they anticipate more efforts by hackers.

"This is not the end of the story," said Mr. Bejtlich of Mandiant. "Once they take a liking to a victim, they tend to come back. It's not like a digital crime case where the intruders steal stuff and then they're gone. This requires an internal vigilance model."

>> Original Source HERE

By Radio FREE Asia

July 6, 2012

Chinese netizens respond to a new UN resolution on Internet freedom.

Chinese Internet users gave a mixed reaction to the passage this week of the first United Nations resolution on Internet freedom, which called on all states to support individuals' rights online as much as offline, with many expressing pessimism that the vote would affect them.

The resolution from the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva passed on Thursday in spite of opposition on from China, Russia, and India, although it garnered the support of dozens of countries ahead of its adoption.

"It's the first U.N. resolution that confirms that human rights in the Internet realm must be protected with the same commitment as in the real world," U.S. Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe told reporters after the vote.

She said the resolution had the support of 85 co-sponsors, 30 of whom were members of the HRC.

Chinese Internet analyst Zeng Ning said Chinese Internet freedom was still a remote dream, with most netizens restricted to seeing only content behind the system of blocks, filters, and human censorship known as the Great Firewall, or GFW.

"There hasn't been much progress in Internet freedom in China," Zeng said. "The Chinese Internet is a totally different thing from the Internet in countries that enjoy true freedoms."

"They have managed to separate off the Internet in China from the Internet everywhere else in the world," he said.

Netizen response

Some netizens commenting on the news of the resolution appeared to agree.

"We are a nationwide local area network," wrote user @waloda on the popular Tianya forums, while user @majiajibenkeyiyong added: "So it passed--how will those ailing four countries implement it?"

Zeng said Chinese netizens were able to access economic and financial information fairly easily, because the free flow of business information was crucial to the ruling Communist Party's focus on economic, rather than political, reform.

"It's not the same with political news," he said. "The Chinese government adopts a highly authoritarian approach to political information, because it wants to maintain the existing political system."

On the Tianya forum, user @dglw3 hit back at government-paid commenters known online as the "50 cent party."

"The 50 centers say that a democratic system isn't suitable for mainland China," the user wrote. "That's like castrating a man to make a eunuch and then saying that men aren't suited for a sex life."

Zeng dismissed claims that the Internet should be more tightly regulated because of harmful content that was available.

"Of course there are security issues on the Internet, like fraud, pornography, violent content, and so on, but all countries have to deal with these problems," he said.

"In democratic countries these issues are dealt with according to the rule of law, which provides a very effective way to manage them."

Chinese computer experts say that the government has continually sought ways to limit freedom of expression on the Internet since people started using it, and that recent controls on the nation's 250 million microbloggers are only the latest step in that process.

The authorities have detained a number of netizens and online editors over retweeted material that was deemed controversial under new guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of online "rumors."

Beijing-based microbloggers have been prevented since March from registering an account on one of the country's hugely popular Twitter-like services in anything but their real name, verified by their national ID card.

The move has been slammed by netizens and rights groups alike as a huge blow to freedom of expression in China, where 513 million netizens rely on forums, social media, and bulletin boards to find news and views that have been censored out of the tightly controlled state media.

UN resolution

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed the U.N. resolution on Thursday. "This resolution is a welcome addition in the fight for the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms online," Clinton said in a statement.

"The free flow of news and information is under threat in countries around the world. We are witnessing an alarming surge in the number of cases involving government censorship and persecution of individuals for their actions online--sometimes for just a single tweet or text message," she said.

Tunisia in particular, had much vested in the resolution, because of the role social networking websites played in ousting president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.

"The most important result of the Tunisian revolution is this right to freedom of expression ... [this] is very important at the moment [in Tunisia] and it is for this reason that there is a strong commitment in Tunisia to consolidate Internet rights," he said.

"Our link with all media networks during the revolution doubles the importance of this commitment to freedom of expression on the Internet which remains a major tool for economic development."

Other countries that backed the resolution on the Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet included Brazil, Nigeria, Sweden, and Turkey.

In a report last week, a Washington-based democracy and human rights advocacy group said that China is becoming increasingly repressive in civil and political life amidst aggressive crackdowns and disappearances.

In an annual report entitled "The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies," Freedom House listed China, Burma, Laos, and North Korea among the world's worst-rated countries for political rights and civil liberties.

Reported by Yang Jiadai for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By BBC World News

June 29, 2012

Web users in mainland China are unable to access Bloomberg's websites, after they were blocked by local authorities.

The news agency thinks the move is a response to an article published about the fortunes of Vice President Xi Jinping's extended family.

China has repeatedly blocked sensitive stories. Two days ago, the New York Times' social media accounts were suspended for several hours.

Xi Jinping is set to become the country's next president.

"Our Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com websites are currently inaccessible in China in reaction, we believe, to a Bloomberg News story that was published on Friday morning," Bloomberg told the BBC.

"Everything else is up and running - consumer and free public [sites] facing are blocked. Terminals are not disrupted."

The article talks about the multi-million dollar wealth of some of the Vice President's relatives.

The fortune amounts to investments in firms with total assets of $376m (£240m), an 18% indirect stake in a rare-earths company with $1.73bn (£1.12bn) in assets and a $20.2m (£12.8m) holding in a technology company.

"As Xi climbed the Communist Party ranks, his extended family expanded their business interests to include minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment, according to public documents compiled by Bloomberg," said the story.

The article said that the vice president's extended family also owns an empty villa at the South China Sea in Hong Kong, with an estimated value of $31.5m (£20.1m), and at least six other Hong Kong properties that have a combined estimated value of $24.1m (£15m).

Great Firewall

It is not the first time China's authorities blocked access to a foreign website.

The country closely monitors all internet content that crosses its borders, and several other western firms failed to penetrate what is known as the Great Firewall of China.

Websites of YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook and Foursquare are all banned in the communist nation.

The move to block access to Bloomberg and Businessweek demonstrates that the wealth of the family of the country's possible next leader is also a sensitive subject for Beijing.

"The government has always been very careful in, on the one hand, emphasising how they want to contain corruption but yet also worrying about how reports of this nature might galvanise public opinion against the Communist Party," said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing.

The New York Times launched a Chinese language version of its website two days ago, aiming to tap into the world's biggest internet market.

But at least three of the newspaper's accounts with China's Twitter-like services got suspended within hours of the launch of its Chinese language portal.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia

20 June 2012

Chinese netizens boycotted a new service rolled out by the hugely popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo this week, after the company tried to launch a fee-paying membership system for tweeters.

Sina, which last month stepped up controls on what its users can post online, announced the new system on Monday, offering special privileges to users who paid the 10 yuan/month membership fee.

But an opinion poll carried out by the "Morning News" website found that 90 percent of more than 7,000 respondents said they "would not pay" the fee.

Sina users have already been warned that anyone posting too much "inappropriate" content could be banned from the Twitter-like service.

Sina Weibo users who post five items of "sensitive" news could be barred from posting for 48 hours, while anyone judged to have posted "harmful information" could have their accounts revoked "in serious cases," the company has told its users.

Xiamen-based blogger Peter Guo said he would be one of the Sina users who boycotted the membership service.

"I won't buy their services," Guo said. "There is a basis for the 10 yuan/month charge on Tencent [microblogging service] because basically most Chinese users use are on the QQ [chat service] too."

"Sina obviously thinks there should be a market for a 10 yuan/month service, but, aside from microblogging, there are no other services," he said.

Profits sought

Guo said Sina's top management had been racking their brains for years to work out how to make a profit out of short messaging services like Weibo.

"In reality, this probably isn't going to happen," he said.

An employee who answered the phone at the Sina Weibo customer service line said the company would continue to offer free microblogging services, however.

"A membership account and a Weibo account are not the same thing," the employee said. "The members are a bit like VIPs, and enjoy certain privileges."

"They have identity privileges and security privileges, and they can follow more accounts, while ordinary accounts are limited to following 2,000 people."

One netizen surnamed Zhang from the northwestern region of Xinjiang said that neither company offers users a service that enables them to express themselves freely online, and that both Tencent and Sina routinely delete content considered critical of the government.

"It seems to me as if they are controlling content very strictly on the microblogs, so that even the most ordinary criticisms get deleted now," he said. "Now, they have another method up their sleeve, which is that they can block your I.P. address."

"This means that you won't even be able to post comments on other websites," Zhang said. "This will have a bigger impact on netizens than simply charging for services."

Tighter controls

China is preparing to roll out tighter Internet controls, extending a real-name registration system in place since March that has been confined to Beijing-based bloggers, according to a new set of official guidelines likely to become law.

In an amendment to existing Internet services management regulations, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) will make real-name registration a legal requirement for participation in forums, blogs, microblogs, and any other interactive online services.

The move will mean less breathing room for China's netizens, whose online activities are already closely monitored, and whose access to content is controlled by a complex system of blocks, filters, and human censorship known collectively as the Great Firewall.

Chinese computer experts say that the government has continually sought ways to limit freedom of expression on the Internet since people started using it, and that controls on the nation's 250 million microbloggers are only the latest step in that process.

Beijing-based microbloggers have been prevented since March from registering an account on one of the country's hugely popular Twitter-like services in anything but their real name, verified by their national ID card.

The move has been slammed by netizens and rights groups alike as a huge blow to freedom of expression in China, where 513 million netizens rely on forums, social media, and bulletin boards to find news and views that have been censored out of the tightly controlled state media.

However, authorities have detained a number of netizens and online editors over retweeted material that was deemed controversial under new guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of online "rumors."

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia

05 June 2012

Chinese authorities in Urumqi detain a man who posted information about the mysterious death of a Uyghur boy.

Chinese authorities have detained a Uyghur man for tweeting "false information" about a boy who family sources say died in police custody under suspicious circumstances in the ethnically troubled Xinjiang region.

Pamir Yasin, a resident of Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, was placed under 15 days' administrative detention, the Xinjiang government news website Tianshannet.com reported, after he tweeted information on the May 20 death of a boy studying at an unsanctioned religious school in Korla.

Sources close to the family told RFA that 11-year-old Mirzahid Amanullah Shahyari died in the custody of Korla police, who told his mother the boy had committed suicide under their watch and forced her to bury the body immediately.

Official Chinese media reports, however, said that he died at a hospital after being beaten by fellow students at the illegal religious school.

The case has drawn strong condemnation from the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which called Mirzahid's treatment "barbaric."

The case was "riddled with many violations of fundamental international human rights law, as well as reminiscent of the persecution that Uyghurs face on a day-to-day basis," it said.

Pamir Yasin had written on his Sina Weibo microblog eight days after Mirzahid's death that the boy had died in police custody.

The authorities accused him of using "distorted information" derived from foreign websites as a basis for his claim, Tianshannet.com said over the weekend.

It said the information he had republished and discussed online was "connected to hostile outside forces that maliciously fabricate [and] distorted facts."

WUC Spokesman Dilxat Raxit condemned the punishment meted out to Pamir Yasin, accusing the authorities of covering up the beating of the boy in detention and spreading "distorted information" of their own.

Pamir Yasin's detention follows the jailing of several Uyghurs for online activities since July 2009 violence that rocked the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi. They were all sentenced on charges of "endangering state security."

Pamir Yasin was a contributor to the Uighurbiz.net website, a site on Uyghur news and issues founded by Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti that recently re-opened after being shut down by the authorities.

According to posts on the website, Pamir Yasin had gotten the information about Mirzahid's death from reports by RFA's Uyghur service.

Information is strictly controlled in Xinjiang, where authorities shut down the Internet in the entire region for ten months following the July 2009 violence.

Pamir Yasin is being held under Article 47 of China's Public Security Administration Punishment Law, which allows authorities to detain citizens without trial for up to 15 days for "inciting ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination or publishing ethnically discriminatory or insulting content in printed materials or online."

Death in custody

Sources close to Mirzahid's family continue to question the circumstances under which he died.

They said Mirzahid, from Nurbagh township, Shayar county, in western Xinjiang's Aqsu prefecture, was first taken into custody along with his teacher and three other students in a late-night crackdown on their forbidden Islamic study group.

The next day, Korla police called his mother, Rizwangul, in Nurbagh and told her Mirzahid had killed himself by hitting his head against a wall while in their custody, the sources said.

When Mirzahid's body was returned to her the next day, she found it had blood on one side of the head, bruises as if he had been beaten with a stick, and a line on his neck as if he had been choked, the sources said.

When she began washing the body to prepare it for burial, Shayar police came to her home and prevented others from visiting.

Police told her she must bury him immediately without speaking to others about his death.

She was told to inform those who inquired about him that he had gone to study at a technology school in Urumqi and fallen off of a building, the sources said.

On May 22, authorities forced her to bury him without reciting prayers from the Koran, they said.

The following day, police came to Nurbagh again and took Mirzahid's uncle, his father's younger brother, into custody, saying he had passed on information to foreign media, the sources said.

Religious education

Mirzahid's mother had sent him to study in the unsanctioned school in Korla because she did not want him to attend public school, the sources said.

Religious activity is strictly controlled in the Xinjiang region, home to nine million mostly Muslim Uyghurs, and children under 18 are forbidden from receiving a religious education or attending mosque.

Mirzahid had first been sent to another school in Hotan when he was seven years old, but the teacher sent him home again out of safety concerns, the source said.

Mirzahid's father, Amanullah Shahyari, has been living in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for the past 11 years.

From there, he had applied for the other members of the family to move to Turkey under a program for Uyghurs instituted following the July 5, 2009 ethnic violence in Urumqi.

Two months ago, the Turkish government granted Mirzahid, his mother, and older brother Miradil permission to live there.

But the three had not been able to leave China because authorities had taken their identity cards and would not allow them to get passports, sources said.

Reported by Mihray Abdilim and Mamatjan Juma for RFA's Uyghur service. Translated by Mihray Abdilim and Dolkun Kamberi. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

>> Original Source