"On the evening of 12 June 2013, according to court documents, three Chinese intruders were arrested by the Indian army in Sultan Chusku, a remote and uninhabited desert area in the mountainous northern region of Ladakh. The three Thursun brothers Adil, 23, Abdul Khaliq, 22 and Salamu, 20 had found themselves in an area of unmarked and disputed borders after a 13-day journey by bus and foot over the rugged Himalayan terrain through China's Xinjiang province, which borders Ladakh."
"The men told army officials that they had fled their family home near the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang after the Chinese authorities intensified their crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and took several of their relatives into detention centres. More than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang appear to have been imprisoned in re-education camps and subjected to torture over the past decade for just attending a mosque or wearing a hijab."
"After two months of interrogation by the military, the brothers were handed over to local police to face charges of illegally crossing the border. But what followed was a bureaucratic nightmare that continues to this day. Unable to communicate in any Indian language, the three men struggled to navigate the legal system. Their court-appointed lawyer faced similar barriers. Only after a year in detention, during which they gradually learned the local language from fellow inmates, could they answer the judge's questions."
Three brothers from near Kashgar in Xinjiang crossed into uninhabited Sultan Chusku in Ladakh after a 13-day journey by bus and foot through rugged Himalayan terrain. They told army officials they fled escalating Chinese crackdowns on Uyghur Muslims after several relatives were detained. Indian forces detained them on 12 June 2013 and, after two months' military interrogation, transferred them to local police on illegal-border-crossing charges. Language barriers and inadequate legal assistance left the brothers unable to navigate the Indian judicial process for a year, during which they learned the local language from fellow inmates and later received 18-month prison sentences.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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