Fred Wang questioned by police
Mandarin Beijing correspondent Fred Wang was questioned by Beijing police on September 26 for two hours. This came a day after CCTV aired a news report about Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, who had just been sentenced to life in prison for separatism on September 23. The CCTV report used Wang’s TV interview with Ilham, which VOA aired in 2013, as evidence supporting the government’s charges. The Beijing police officers asked Wang why he interviewed Ilham. Wang told them the interview was done after Ilham’s car was rear-ended by unidentified people who threatened to kill his family for what he did for the Uyghur cause. In this long interview Ilham criticized Chinese government’s ethnic minority policy. Though the police didn’t explicitly threaten Fred during the questioning, they apparently wanted him to know that his reporting activities are being closely monitored.