Bangkok police nab two Uighur escapees, return them to prison in Tak
Two Uighurs who escaped from jail in Tak’s Mae Sot district twice were caught in Bangkok, while the immigration police chief in Tak has been transferred for being lax in his duties.
The two escapees were arrested in Bangkok’s Wang Thong Lang district and flown back to Tak. The two Uighur men had broken out of immigration jail in Mae Sot mid-October and were later spotted in Bangkok. Records show they had broken out of jail twice.
Meanwhile, Pol Colonel Sangkhom Tadso, chief of the Tak immigration police, has been transferred to another region for repeatedly failing in his job.
In 2017, 20 Uighur inmates had escaped from the immigration detention cell in Songkhla. The provincial immigration bureau at that time was under Sangkhom’s supervision.
There are about 11 million Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic-speaking ethnic group, living in the Chinese state of Xinjiang. Beijing has been holding more than one million members of this minority in detention camps, and is subjecting many more to intense surveillance and restrictions.