They were all standing together, four men at the old airport in Beijing. Three plainclothes officers, who had traveled specially from Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Ikram Nurmehmet. The filmmaker, 31 at the time, a broad-shouldered man with wide pants, sneakers and a baseball cap, seemed like a normal passenger, but the trip he was about to embark on wasn’t voluntary. He had just been arrested.

On the morning of May 29, 2023, Beijing police called Nurmehmet on the phone. He lives with his wife and child in a suburban housing development in the far northern part of the Chinese capital. Friends would later say that officers had asked him to step outside his door because they had something to clarify, "facts of the case."

He had hardly gone outside before police officers forced him into a car and drove him to the airport. They called his wife from the vehicle to tell her to bring clothes. That was the first time she had heard that her husband had been accused of being a terrorist. But she didn't learn why.

When she saw Ikram Nurmehmet at the airport, it would be the last time for quite a while. Afterward, she told acquaintances he had looked pale. One of the three policemen handed over her husband's wedding ring and an amulet, saying they were "too valuable." She says Nurmehmet also shouted to her: "Do your best!" The men then disappeared.

Nurmehmet was flown to Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region that is home to the Uyghurs, a Turkic people systematically harassed by the Chinese apparatus. Nurmehmet is also a Uyghur. Friends and family turned to DER SPIEGEL out of fear that he could be facing the harshest state repression.

Since 2017, the Chinese state has set up hundreds of re-education camps in the northwest of the country, equipped with anti-tank barriers, guard towers and barbed wire. The Chinese leadership has downplayed them as vocational training centers, which, they claim, people attend voluntarily. But government documents from the "Xinjiang Police Files ," published last year by DER SPIEGEL together with international media partners, show that a shoot-to-kill order was in effect in the camps. Hundreds of thousands, likely over a million people, were temporarily detained.

The Chinese government has since tried to give the impression that the situation in Xinjiang has normalized. The re-education centers? No need for them any longer. The economy is prospering, it proclaims, and everything is great.

The regime even organizes propaganda tours. "To give the world an impression of the tremendous economic changes taking place on the ground, the Chinese state information office invited 22 journalists from 17 countries on a press trip to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region," enthused the Berlin Zeitung newspaper, just one of a number of media outlets covering the trips. China experts are also touring the region. In May 2023, a few days before Nurmehmet’s arrest in Beijing, Thomas Heberer and Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, two of the better-known China experts in Germany, set off for Xinjiang.

Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an article about their its visit to the region in September. The article noted that there were "clear signs of a return to 'normality'." "The various camps that were created during the peak of the campaign against terror, have apparently now been largely dissolved." As alleged evidence, Heberer and Schmidt-Glintzer cited an essay by Adrian Zenz, of all people.

The German anthropologist had almost single-handedly  been able to prove the existence of the re-education camps. He found the tender for construction bids on the internet in 2017.

The documents referenced things like barbed wire, concrete and tank traps. He was the first to prove that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are forced to pick cotton in the fields of Xinjiang against their will, like slaves. And Zenz was the person to whom the "Xinjiang Police Files" were originally leaked. Few are more knowledgeable about the oppression faced by the Uyghurs than he is.

"What Heberer and Schmidt-Glintzer are doing does not reflect scientific methodology," says Zenz. "It's propaganda – friendly China experts who aren't Xinjiang experts but proclaim on the basis of superficial observations that things are just fine." The police state in Xinjiang is no longer as visible as it once was, says Zenz. "But it's still there." Uyghur culture, he says, "has been Disneyfied – they are made to dance and sing for tourists from other provinces. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, especially the elites, have been put in prisons."

Just like Ikram Nurmehmet.

In 2018, the authorities had ordered him to come to Ürümqi and surrender his passport. But he wasn’t arrested at the time. Perhaps, speculated a friend, he assumed that from that point on he would be safe from persecution.

"Uyghurs who lived outside Xinjiang in other provinces of China actually did feel safer. Ikram Nurmehmet is that sad counter-example that Uyghurs must continue living in fear no matter where they are," says Maya Wang, the interim China director of the organization Human Rights Watch. "We estimate that around half a million people were locked up in prison in Xinjiang at the end of 2022, with an average sentence of 12-and-a-half years."

That estimate is substantiated by cases documented in the "Xinjiang Police Files." One example is the case of Adiljan T. He looks tired as he peers into the camera. The official records show that he has middle school diploma and blood type AB, officials. His offense: As an 18-year-old, he apparently spent two weeks working out at a fitness center in Ürümqi. On October 28, 2017, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison "for preparing a terrorist act."

Another example is Ablikim E., born on August 13, 1991, almost the same age as Nurmehmet. His cheeks are glowing in the prisoner photo. In March 2012, he and his mother allegedly listened for about an hour to an audio file played to him by his father on his mobile phone about religious taxes, veiled women and men with beards, the security forces noted. On December 25, 2017, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning a terrorist act.

In recent years, Ikram Nurmehmet has established himself as a filmmaker in Beijing. He shot commercials and short films, and received invitations to international film festivals. His main characters were often Uyghurs, and sometimes he would incorporate subversive messages. In his 18-minute film "Elephant in the Car" from 2020, a Han Chinese woman and two Uyghurs ride together in a shared cab. The camera follows them as they drive through Beijing at night. The woman feels uncomfortable as the men befriend the cab driver. But the Uyghur songs they sing are still in her head even after they get out of the car. Despite her initial rejection, an impression of Uyghur culture still lingers in her mind.

Describing his thoughts about the film, Nurmehmet said: "Every ordinary day passes, every moment, every second, but our experiences are unique and irreplaceable. When these experiences turn into memories, they stay with you for a lifetime, whether good or bad." A friend describes him as a person with a strong sense of justice and as someone who counted Uyghurs as well as many Han Chinese among his circle of friends.

He Didn't Know His Name Was on a List

Nurmehmet obtained a degree in film studies at Marmara University in Istanbul and had already left Xinjiang for Turkey at the age of 18. During his college years, a childhood friend came to stay with him, a Uyghur who was later arrested. His family claims to have learned the Nurmehmet was arrested because of this. But it remains unclear why he was only now incarcerated.

"Unfortunately, it's an extremely typical pattern," says researcher Adrian Zenz. "The authorities construct networks of relationships. Who has what to do with whom? Then the arrests begin."

Where is Nurmehmet being held today? What does he stand accused of? What kind of punishment is he possibly facing? The Chinese authorities didn't respond to a request for comment from DER SPIEGEL.

But his supporters have discovered that his name is on a list, leaked in 2020, that was compiled by Chinese authorities and contains the names of thousands of Uyghurs like him, along with their ID numbers. According the list, he is considered a "terror suspect" - but he was unaware of the allegation.

In early April of this year, he received another call from the authorities in Xinjiang. They told him to come to Ürümqi because he had lost his identity card. But the card had not disappeared, it was an obvious lie. Although he had handed in his passport, he still had his ID card with him.

Later, when he told a friend about it, he seemed worried, and the friend says he was thinking about moving overseas. e had contemplated moving abroad and had already applied for a new passport. At the same time, he seemed unsure whether he should really leave China – after all, things were going quite well for him professionally. And in 2022, his wife had a baby.