Two ethnic Kazakhs from China's Xinjiang region faced the threat of deportation back to China after Kazakhstan arrested them for "illegally" entering the Central Asian country in an asylum bid, their lawyers said Monday.
Kaster Musakhan and Murager Alimuly were detained by the national security committee (KNB) days after publishing video appeals in which they admitted crossing the border illegally and begged Kazakhstan to allow them to stay after claiming they were tortured in China.
A million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are estimated to be held in internment camps in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang that authorities have called "vocational education centres".
"They have been taken in and are being interrogated," one of the pair's lawyers, Shynkuat Baizhanov, told AFP.
"It is normal procedure because they admitted to illegally crossing the border. They will probably be held until trial," Baizhanov said.
KNB could not be reached for comment.
– 'I couldn't bear the torture' –
Oil-rich Kazakhstan, with strong economic links to China, has become a hub for reporting on Xinjiang thanks to local activists who have encouraged former detainees and citizens with relatives suffering in Xinjiang to speak publicly.
There are at least 1.5 million Kazakhs living in Xinjiang, the region's second largest Turkic group after the Uighurs.
Alimuly, who describes Musakhan as a business partner, said both of them were beaten when police in Emin County, a subdivision of Xinjiang, briefly detained them last month.
"I came here because I couldn't bear the torture anymore," said Alimuly in a video recorded before his detention that has been widely shared online.
"You have to be very careful, otherwise (Chinese authorities) send you to study."
Musakhan said they crossed the border on foot at an unguarded section in early October after he learned police were going to detain him again.
The pair walked tens of kilometres before arriving in a village in Kazakhstan, where they stayed for three days before leaving for the country's former capital Almaty.
"I am looking for everyone's help! I want to live!" Musakhan said in one of the videos published on the YouTube channel of the informal Atajurt rights group.
"My aim is to become a Kazakhstan citizen!"
The dramatic case bears similarities to that of Sayragul Sauytbay, a former civil servant and member of China's Communist Party who entered Kazakhstan using forged documents.
Sauytbay testified to working in a "prison located in the mountains" where 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held.
Kazakhstan chose not to return Sauytbay to China as public and foreign media interest in the case surged but authorities did not grant her asylum either.
Sauytbay, who was eventually allowed to seek asylum with her family in Sweden, said migration authorities had told her that granting her asylum would risk angering China.
Landlocked Kazakhstan has described itself as the "buckle" in Beijing's trillion-dollar Belt and Road trade and infrastructure project and prides itself on good relations with both Russia and China.
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