China 'locked me up in a secret Dubai jail': Woman, 26, claims she was held for eight days at secret detention centre with at least two Uyghur Muslims
A young Chinese woman has claimed she was held for eight days at a secret detention centre run by her country in Dubai with at least two Uyghur Muslims.
It may be the first evidence that China is operating a ‘black site’ – or secret jail where prisoners are not usually charged and have no legal protection – beyond its borders.
Wu Huan, 26, was on the run in Dubai trying to avoid extradition to her home country because her fiance is considered a dissident there.
Wu’s claims were reported by the Associated Press news agency, which said it had not been able to confirm or disprove them independently
Miss Wu said yesterday she was abducted from a hotel in the emirate and detained by Chinese officials at a villa converted into a jail.
While there, she said she saw or heard two other prisoners, both members of the largely Muslim Uyghur minority which is heavily persecuted in China.
She was questioned and threatened in Chinese and forced to sign legal documents incriminating her fiance Wang Jingyu, 19, for harassing her, she said.
She was released on June 8 and is now seeking asylum with Mr Wang in the Netherlands.
Miss Wu and Mr Wang are not Uyghurs but Han Chinese, the majority ethnicity in China.
Mr Wang is wanted by China because he posted messages questioning Chinese media coverage of the Hong Kong protests in 2019 and China’s actions in a border clash with India.
Black sites are common in China but Miss Wu’s account is the only evidence known to experts that Beijing has one in another country.
Miss Wu and Mr Wang are not Uyghurs but Han Chinese, the majority ethnicity in China
Its existence would reflect how China is increasingly using its international clout to detain or bring back citizens it wants from overseas, whether they are dissidents, corruption suspects or ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs.
Miss Wu’s claims were reported by the Associated Press news agency, which said it had not been able to confirm or disprove them independently.
She could not pinpoint the exact location of the black site.
China’s foreign ministry denied her claims, saying: ‘The situation the person talked about is not true.’
The authorities in Dubai did not respond to requests for comment on claims of a foreign black site there.
Radha Stirling, a lawyer from the group Detained in Dubai, said she has worked with about a dozen people claiming to have been held in villas in the United Arab Emirates, including citizens of Canada, India and Jordan but not China.