Lu Guang, 57, has been missing and presumed detained since Nov. 3, when he was in the regional capital, Urumqi
Authorities in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have detained an award-winning documentary photographer who was on a trip there, his wife has said.
Lu Guang, 57, has been missing and presumed detained since Nov. 3, when he was in the regional capital, Urumqi, Lu’s wife, Xu Xiaoli, said.
Xu said via her Twitter account late on Monday that Lu had been invited by a friend to Urumqi on Oct. 23, and had later traveled to Kashgar, in the south of the region, on Oct. 31.
But his family lost contact with Lu after he returned to Urumqi on the night of Nov. 3, and Xu later learned that her husband and a fellow photographer had been taken back to Kashgar by Chinese state security police, according to a statement pinned to her Twitter account.
Xu declined to comment further when contacted by RFA on Tuesday.
“Everything I know is in my statement, so there is nothing more to say,” she said. “There has been no news. I have made a lot of calls to Xinjiang, to numbers I found online, but no one is picking up.”
An employee who answered the phone at the Kashgar police department declined to comment in the absence of a missing-persons report.
“His family would need to report him missing to the local police department, and then it would be up to them to keep you informed,” the employee said.
Suppressing information
Patrick Poon, China researcher for the London-based rights group Amnesty International, said Lu’s sudden disappearance came as Beijing seeks to fend off mounting international criticism of its mass internment of Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic groups in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang.
