He is charged with spying on fellow Uighurs. Here is the story (note the links at this site are slow-opening):
A 61-year-old Uighur living in Sweden as a political refugee since 1997 has been charged with spying for China on Uighur expatriates, a Swedish prosecutor said Wednesday.
The man was identified in court documents as Swedish citizen Babur Maihesuti. He was arrested in Stockholm on June 4, 2009.
He has been charged with aggravated espionage conducted “during the period January 2008 up until June 3, 2009,” prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand told AFP.
“He passed information to a Chinese diplomat and a Chinese journalist who, on assignment from the Chinese intelligence service, carried out operations in Sweden for the Chinese state,” the indictment filed with Stockholm district court on Tuesday claimed.
Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Central Asian people residing in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, have accused Beijing of decades of religious, cultural and political oppression.
Maihesuti spied on Uighurs active in associations in Sweden, Norway, Germany and the United States, Lindtsranbd said.
According to the indictment, he “made it appear as though he sympathised with the ethnic Uighurs, took part in conferences and meetings with them, and kept secret that he was passing information about them to representatives for the Chinese state.”
The information included details about their “political asylum, health conditions, country of residence, travels and telephone numbers.”
The indictment said he was paid and received personal favours for his services.
“The crime is considered aggravated because it was systematic, conducted professionally over a lengthy period, and may have caused or cause future serious harm to a large number of people,” it said.
Lindstrand said the man “denied committing any crime.”
“He says the meetings took place because he was asked by (exiled US-based Uighur leader) Rebiya Kadeer to negotiate with someone who represented the Chinese state, in other words the journalist he met with. That’s his explanation,” he said.
What interested me was to learn that we have a US-based Uighur leader? Is that why the American Uighur community was so eager to get refugee status for Uighurs being held in detention at Guantanamo Bay? By the way, note the story from Sweden never mentions that the Uighurs are Muslims.
In a companion story, China warned the UN about what they claim are fake refugees, here.
China warned Tuesday that UN refugee programmes “should not be a haven for criminals” and said 22 Uighurs who are seeking asylum in Cambodia were involved in crimes. A foreign ministry spokeswoman said China was investigating the Uighurs, who include three children and who arrived at the UN refugee agency office in Phnom Penh after fleeing ethnic conflict in northwest China in July.