On photo: Protest rally in front of Chinese Embassy by Uighurs living in Belgium
 
A court in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang has sentenced five imams to seven years in Chinese concentration camps for “illegally” organizing Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the World Uighur Congress reported.
 
The clerics were also charged with illegally providing copies of the Koran at a recent sentencing rally in Xayar County, near Xinjiang’s Aksu City, said the Munich-based spokesman of the Congress.
 
More than 300 people attended the rally organized by the County People’s Court, said the spokesman.
 
In a separate report, the World Uighur Congress said authorities in Aksu’s Kalpin County had demolished a mosque, which refused to hang slogans supporting the Beijing Olympics. It happened despite the worldwide response initiated by the report about this incident.
 
Moreover, Muslims were officially not allowed to show up on the streets during the “Olympic torch-bearing ceremony” for “security purposes”.
 
State media said that more than 100,000 Chinese people completed pilgrimages to Mecca from 1985 to 2006. An annual record of 10,000 Chinese Muslims were sent to Saudi Arabia from November 2006 to last January, reports said.
 
There are almost 21 million Muslims living in China. Half of them are from the Huai nation living in Northeastern region.
 
The largest ethnic community of the Province of Xinjiang consists of Uighurs practicing Islam. Their number is about 7.4 million.
 
Chinese authorities persecute Muslims on a regular basis, and imams of the mosques are supposed to undergo special “political retraining”.