The security agents came for Adeham Abliz late on a Thursday night.
That day, September 8, 2016, had been much like any other in the 59-year-old Uighur man’s life in the city of Ghulja in north-western China.
Abliz, a shopkeeper, had performed his five daily prayers, starting with fajr at dawn through to isha after dusk. He had wandered through the neighbourhood and brought home groceries after a day of fasting in the lead-up to the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha.
He would not be allowed to finish dinner. Around 11pm, two officers in plain clothes arrived at the house.
“We need to talk to you about something. You need to come with us,” they told Abliz, a devout Muslim who had provided religious teaching in the local community and kept religious texts in his house – marking him as a subject of suspicion for the Chinese Communist Party.
Abliz and his family resisted, demanding to know why he was being taken. Ignoring their desperate pleas, the two men escorted him outside and took him away.
“That was the last time I saw my father with my own eyes,” says his daughter, Meyassar Adham. The same day, she had been granted a visa to join her partner in Australia. Advised by her migration agent to urgently get out of Xinjiang province, she left a week later, bound for the safety of the Adelaide suburbs.
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