The Id Kah Mosque day before the assassination occurred.

The morning after Eid al Fitr, we were preparing to leave Kashgar for the Karakurom Highway. As we tried to upload photos and send out emails, our internet slowed to a crawl and then stopped completely.

This was not unusual. Though we were using VPNs to navigate around the Great Firewall of China, we were still often stymied. Sometimes, the government throttles any traffic by making the ‘pipes’ internet traffic used tiny. At that point, VPN’s do nothing for you.

We did not know it, but this was no routine internet shutdown. The local government had completely shut down the internet, and it would remain off for the entire day. The government wanted to control the news, to control people. An assassination had just occurred five minutes from our hotel.

The assassination occurred just a hundred feet from where this photo was taken.

It had happened just outside the Id Kah Mosque, beneath the Pamir hostel, the place where we had originally intended to stay. At seven a.m. Beijing time, the seventy-four year old Jume Tahir, Kashgar’s leading Imam, finished up his morning prayers. As he was leaving, just outside the mosque’s northeast gate, three young men approached him. Two of the men grabbed him, and one of them men stabbed him multiple times. After killing him, the three young men quickly left the scene, leaving Tahir to die in a pool of his own blood.

The assassination occurred a five minute walk from our hotel, just where I had been photographing the day before. Dan, an American, claimed to have talked to several Chinese people who witnessed the event, saying they saw a pool of blood and had watched confusedly as people ran from the scene. These Chinese people were repeatedly detained for questioning throughout the morning.

The three young men who committed the assassination were apprehended soon after the killing, though I still cannot find any source saying how quickly. Later that morning, I know that the entire city was encircled by the police, and everyone leaving had to be thoroughly checked. We sat in traffic for almost twenty minutes until we were able to walk through a checkpoint and get out of the city. That was at around one in the afternoon, Beijing time.

The reaction by authorities was not as rapid as one would expect. Initially, the police secured the scene like they would any other murder, according to an American staying in the Pamir Hostel, overlooking the scene. About an hour after the assassination, police came by the hostel to check papers, passports and train tickets, apparently sensitive to the fact that this was a place where foreigners were staying.

At this point, the police presence in the town was fairly light. Around this time, I was trying to find out how to get out of the city, and I realized that there were almost no private cars or cabs on the main roads. Apparently, traffic was being stopped.

Buses Transport Police to the scene several hours after the incident

A few hours later, the American staying in the Pamir Hostel says, the police presence suddenly ballooned. Buses that were normally used for transporting tourists were now commandeered to transport police, with at least six parked at the northeast corner of the mosque. The police returned to the Pamir, with a more thorough investigation. Those who had not already left were now subjected to several hours of being guarded and forced to wait in one corner of the hostel. Apparently, the police were concerned that people overlooking the scene would take photos and send them to journalists. Why was there a delayed reaction is still unclear? Perhaps, word got back to local leaders and they pushed for a harder hand, or perhaps when leaders realized that the foreign media was on the story (the BBC was reporting it within hours), they tried to clamp down.

Police Van beneath the Pamir Hostel

The most important question though, is why was Tahir assassinated? Like his assassins, he was a Uighur. As the head of China’s largest mosque, he should have been a respected member of the community in this largely Muslim city. Yet, after his death, few Kashgaris mourned his loss. The reaction of locals who I talked with was blasé.

Police Patrol

No Kashgaris seemed to be bothered because Tahir was considered a communist puppet. Each time the government was implementing a new policy or trying to combat unrest, Tahir would speak on television in Uighur and act as a mouthpiece for the government’s position. This is not surprising since all religious leaders in China serve at the behest of the Communist Party.

He was killed for this collaboration with the Communist. His assassins wanted to draw a line in the sand; you are either with the Uighurs or you are with the Chinese.

Photo of the police inside the Pamir Hostel

Unusual for this blog, none of these photos are from Galen. The top one is from Josh at Far West China, the second one is Lee’s, and the others are from an unnamed source staying in the Pamir hostel during the assassination