The exiled leader of China's Uighurs said nearly 10,000 of her people were detained or killed last month in ethnic unrest and appealed for the United Nations to investigate their fate.
Rebiya Kadeer, the US-based head of the World Uighur Congress, also said she was "perplexed" at the muted US response to the violence as she spoke during a visit to Japan that has drawn angry protests from Beijing.
Citing local sources and speaking through an interpreter, she said almost 10,000 people "disappeared" in one night on July 5 when authorities cracked down on the unrest in the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang.
"Where did those people go?" she said. "If they died, where did they go?"
Kadeer, 62, said Chinese police opened machine-gun fire at Uighur people after dark once the electricity was turned off, and that the following morning large numbers of Uighur men had gone missing.
"Uighur people who were there must have been either killed or taken away," she told a Tokyo press conference. "The next morning, the streets were cleaned and the bodies of ethnic Han (Chinese) were left in the streets."
Kadeer said she had asked Japanese lawmakers during a meeting to push for a UN investigation.
"I want to urge the international community to dispatch an independent, third-party investigation mission to investigate what happened," she said.
"If China can confidently say that the Uighur people are at fault, then open up the area, tell the third-party commission what really happened."
China has said police opened fire to prevent further bloodshed, killing 12 "mobsters," according to state media reports, and that more than 1,400 people were detained for their involvement in the unrest.
PHOTO CAPTION
An elderly Uighur passes Chinese paramilitary policemen standing guard outside the Grand Bazaar in the Uighur district of Urumqi city, in China's Xinjiang region, July 14, 2009.
Source: Agencies