Xinjiang Prison-Camp Survivor and Family Tailed by ‘Super Suspicious’ Individuals in D.C.

A former Xinjiang detention-camp prisoner, his family, and others accompanying them appeared to have been followed and discreetly photographed by two women on the National Mall yesterday afternoon, sources familiar with the incident told National Review. This raised suspicions about the possibility that the family was being surveilled, though there is no way to confirm this.

The camp survivor, Ovalbek Turdakun, arrived in the U.S. on Friday with his wife and their eleven-year-old son. Turdakun is expected to present significant, high-value evidence to Congress and the International Criminal Court, revealing previously undisclosed aspects of China’s genocidal campaign in Xinjiang based on his ten-month detention in a camp in 2018. In an interview with NR late Tuesday, Turdakun described at length the medical practices to which the Chinese authorities subjected him in the camp. The family’s arrival is also noteworthy because they all arrived together and are ethnically Kyrgyz. They might be the first Christian Xinjiang emigrés to reach the U.S.

The Turdakuns were walking around Washington, D.C., with a larger group on Tuesday afternoon, following a visit to the Capitol building, when the incident took place.

The group had stopped in a side yard of the National Mall, which lacked visual backdrops traditionally appealing to tourists. The Capitol building and Washington Monument couldn’t be seen from their location.

Members of the group soon noticed two women each positioned on a different side of the Turdakuns, taking selfies with their phone cameras pointed in the family’s direction, according to one of the sources with knowledge of the incident, who asked to go unnamed given the security concerns involved.

That person called the behavior of the two women “super suspicious” and also said that they appeared to be ethnically Han Chinese.

One of the women, after taking a number of selfies, put her phone on her hip and walked past the group in a way that would have allowed her to continue recording video or taking photographs. She then sat down on a bench and began taking selfies from a new angle. The second woman remained behind her.

Someone in the group with the Turdakun family then walked over toward the woman on the bench and stared at her for less than a minute, prompting her to walk away. This person next did the same to the other woman, who also walked away in the same direction as the first.

Around 15 minutes later, the two selfie-taking women returned to the Turdakun family group’s location together.

A member of the group filmed a 15-second-long video — which NR obtained — of the two women. That individual used a front-facing phone camera over his shoulder to film the women, who wore baseball caps and sunglasses while following the group.

Then, the two women walked past the group together, side-by-side. The family then left the National Mall.

The second source told NR that he told the FBI about the incident on Tuesday afternoon. The FBI declined to comment for this report.

While there’s no confirmation that this episode was related to any Chinese-government activities, Beijing follows dissidents and minority groups around the world in harassment campaigns often intended to coerce them into returning to China, where they face a high risk of continued persecution.

The U.S. government took new steps to counter those practices in March. The State Department sanctioned Chinese officials involved in the harassment of Uyghurs across the world, and the Justice Department indicted several Chinese agents for surveilling dissidents and minorities on U.S. soil. 

The Turdakuns have previous experience with this sort of harassment, from their time in Kyrgyzstan, where they lived for two years after fleeing Xinjiang. They told two groups that worked to bring them to the U.S. — the video-surveillance trade group IPVM and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — that Chinese officers continued to call them to ask them to return to Xinjiang when they lived in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan.