Police admitted to being in custody eight years later: the Xinjiang family of drivers still cannot wait for a death report

In 2018, a Uighur family in Aksu, Xinjiang, was informed by the police that Yassinjiang Toyanti, the bus driver, had died in a “traffic accident”. He was last taken away and deprived of his liberty. The blogger says:Radio Free AsiaIn contact with the local police, two police officers admitted that Yassin River had died in custody, and that the police ' s accounts of the incident had thus been irresistible.

Yassin River was born in 1980 with only primary school education. He sent his five-year-old son, Habiba, to Egypt, where he was taken care of by his sister, Jeyhanguri, who lived there, and wanted the child to learn his religion and mother tongue. The family stated that the police considered this educational option a risk and asked him to take the child back to Xinjiang. The child returned and the father was taken repeatedly.

From 2016 to 2018, Yassin River was detained four times. The family told Radio Free Asia that the last detention had resulted from his stopping while driving the bus, and that Muslim passengers were praying. The religious practices of sending children abroad to school and parking for passengers, decisions of families and work, are rewritten as political suspects in Xinjiang's “de-extremization” governance.

Immediately after the death, Geyhanguri, who lives in Belgium, found the story to be incomprehensible: how could a person who had been detained die in a normal traffic accident? The only way that a sister who stayed in Xinjiang would have been to repeat the police notice. In a telephone interview in 2026, one police officer mentioned that Yassinjiang had been taken to hospital, while the police station director admitted that the death had occurred while in custody. The police still do not provide an autopsy, a medical record or a clear medical cause of death.

Family queries were not exchanged for the file, but rather increased the loss to the family. (b) The family claims that the sister who had disclosed the death to her sister abroad was subsequently detained for “discovering State secrets”; Mothers are also punished for having been in Turkey. Gehan Guri has not known where his mother and sister are being held, nor how long they have been sentenced.

Australian Institute for Strategic Policy ResearchXinjiang Data ProjectThe expansion of detention facilities in the Aksu region was documented. The experience of Yassin River has put the system on a family time line: the father was detained four times, the death notice gave an unexplained “car accident”, and the sister was arrested after she had passed on the news and the mother disappeared from the home.

Eight years later, Gey Khan Guri finally confirmed from the local police that his brother died in custody. She still has no complete record of her brother ' s death, nor has she been able to locate her mother and sister. The family was not faced with a late correction, but with three vacant places left by the State after it had custody, medical care, death notification and information penalties.