Ekpar Asat, a young entrepreneur and journalist from Xinjiang, disappeared in 2016 after returning from the US where he had been on the exchange program and visited his sister Rayhan, a Harvard law student. He had promised to come back to the US in a few months with their parents to watch her become Harvard’s first ever Uighur graduate.
“My brother and I were so close, but it was also an exam period and I was so busy, I wasn’t talking to my family every day,” Rayhan told the Guardian. “I know that he arrived home safely … but suddenly my parents cancelled their visit to the US for my graduation, and I was like ‘What’s happening’, but they wouldn’t tell me … None of it added up. He was nowhere to be found.”
