By EDWARD WONGSEPT. 26, 2014
Relatives have said students of Ilham Tohti are being held. Credit Andy Wong/Associated Press
URUMQI, China — The three students appeared one after another in video images broadcast to millions of Chinese, sitting behind bars and denouncing Ilham Tohti, the man they had once called their mentor.
One of the students said that Mr. Tohti, an ethnic Uighur professor persecuted by officials, had used a news website where they worked to “hype” ethnic tensions. Another said the professor had threatened to “bury” the student if he did not continue to do design work on the site.
Televised jailhouse confessions by people entangled in the Chinese legal system are increasingly common, but these three testimonies, broadcast late Thursday by the state’s China Central Television, were notable for what was at stake for the professor, and for what they revealed about the plight of the students. Seven of them vanished in Beijing around the time in January when Mr. Tohti was detained by the police. Until Thursday, none of the students’ families had seen any of them or heard their voices.
The videos were presented by prosecutors in a two-day trial of Mr. Tohti on separatism charges last week here in Urumqi, the capital of the western region of Xinjiang, where violence between Uighurs and members of China’s Han majority is surging.