Rahile Omer, the youngest detainee photographed in the Xinjiang Police Files, has died in a Chinese prison at 23.

RFA Uyghur Service reports that officials in Konasheher County, Kashgar, had confirmed by phone that she died one to two months earlier.

Her case is documented in my 2022 study of the Xinjiang Police Files. She was the youngest of the 2,884 photographed persons confirmed as detained.

Xinjiang’s mass surveillance platform flagged her as a “Type 12 person,” meaning someone connected to an existing police case. Both of her parents had been detained on July 3, 2017. Her father was a government official. The records note that she was first spared because she was “14 years old, a non-adult student.” Police detained her on September 28, less than three months after her parents.

RFA has now reported what followed. A judicial official said that in 2019 she was moved from the camp to a detention center because the “education” had not taken effect, she had given no information about others in her case, and she had prayed through gestures in her dormitory. In October 2021, after she turned 18, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison. An officer said she died of a heart condition but gave no further details. These statements cannot be independently verified.

Rahile spent more than a third of her life in custody because of her family. Beijing should release her medical and prison records and disclose what has happened to her parents.

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