Ilham Tohti
In Brief Ilham Tohti, a public Uyghur intellectual and professor of economics at the Central Minorities University, was detained at the Beijing Capital International Airport on his way to the US on February 2, 2013. Tohti was later sentenced to life imprisonment on September 23, 2014 on charges of "separatism" by a court in China's Xinjiang region. Case History Tohti was with his daughter when police stopped them during security checks at the airport and prevented them from b