The images from the camp refuse to fade from the mind’s eye – hours, days, even weeks after the folder has been clicked shut.

A gaunt prisoner, perhaps in his mid-50s, is holding out his bound hands to a woman wearing a white lab coat while a guard holding an angular truncheon stands behind him, a smile on his face. A young man is sitting in a "Tiger Chair,” a steel torture device in which the arms can be immobilized. Another photograph shows a prisoner naked from the waist up, his torso and back revealing clear signs of violence.

The next photo: A man, accompanied by guards, is walking down a prison hallway, past heavy doors and locks, his posture bent, his hands and legs bound. It is impossible to say how old he might be – his head is hidden beneath a black hood. Like all the other prisoners, he is wearing a reflective vest.

These men and women were not photographed in an official high-security prison, but rather in a reeducation camp in Tekes, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the vast majority of those locked up are Uyghurs. On paper, they are Chinese, a Muslim minority in the People’s Republic. But in their home region of Xinjiang, Chinese officials have built up a powerful system of surveillance in recent years that controls almost every aspect of their daily lives. Experts believe that more than a million Uyghurs have been locked away in reeducation camps. They are forced to learn communist songs and attend flag ceremonies. Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S. have classified the Chinese policies in Xinjiang as "genocide.” Chinese propaganda, by contrast, refers to the institutions as "free vocational training.”

The people in the camps? China says they are all there voluntarily. Human rights violations? Invented lies and disinformation. China has thus far denied access to the region to all independent human rights organizations from abroad. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has been demanding access to the area since 2018 – and she is finally being allowed to visit Xinjiang this week.

The only information about what really goes on in the camps has come from a handful of eyewitnesses who were able to first leave the camps and then leave China. Until now.

The images from Tekes are part of a new leak, called the Xinjiang Police Files – more than 10 gigabytes of Chinese government data, classified as "confidential” and "internal.” The leak includes thousands of photos of prisoners, secret speeches, instruction material used by security officials and seemingly endless lists of prisoner names. For apologists of this state-run detention system, it will become increasingly difficult to defend the camps.

The data was initially sent to the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz, who has published secret information about the camps in the past. According to Zenz, the information comes from an anonymous source, apparently a hacker who managed to penetrate the computer systems of Chinese security agencies. According to the anthropologist, the source placed no conditions on the use of the data and no payment was made.

"It is like a window into a police state from which so little information emerges. We’ve never seen anything like it,” Zenz says.

He has made a name for himself through his work on Xinjiang. He was the first to track down the calls for tender on the Chinese internet for the construction of the reeducation camps, initially from public sources. In government budgets, he found spending hikes for new detention facilities, some showing increases of over 1,000 percent. Using administrative files, he was able to show that Xinjiang has become perhaps the largest orphanage in the world. Hundreds of thousands of children have been handed over to the state because both of their parents are being reeducated in camps. Two years ago, he was sent the Karakax List, which was reported on by numerous media outlets in Germany and abroad.

"It is definitely a systemic crime against humanity,” says Zenz. "We have here a multitude of different crimes – from internment in reeducation camps to forced labor, to the destruction of mosques and restrictions on religion. The goal is that of assimilating these peoples, to break their spirits so that they submit to the party and can be better controlled by the state.”

Through Zenz, the data from this new leak, the Xinjiang Police Files, found its way to an international media consortium including 14 partners. In Germany, these included the public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and DER SPIEGEL. International partners include Le Monde, the BBC, USA Today, El País and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The international reporting team spent weeks verifying the authenticity of the data. Photos showing buildings were matched up with satellite photos. Some of the photos also included GPS data indicating the precise location where the picture was taken.

Individual documents and photos were sent to renowned forensic experts for examination and the speeches and official instructions were compared with earlier leaks and statements by Chinese party cadres. Finally, a team comprised of journalists from DER SPIEGEL and the BBC traveled to Turkey and the Netherlands to meet with family members of camp inmates whose names and photos could be found in the data.

The conclusion: The data is authentic. Disturbingly so. Carefully listed in Excel spreadsheets, row upon row, column upon column.

The data includes almost every single resident of the Konasheher region, located just south of the city of Kashgar. Hundreds of thousands of people are listed, complete with names, birthdates and ID numbers. More than 22,000 were interned in 2018 according to the Xinjiang Police Files, more than 12 percent of the adult population. And they were locked away for at least a year – in the best-case scenario, that is how long it takes to complete a reeducation program that started in 2017. Those the system fails to break must remain in detention for far longer.

At least one of the camps near the Konasheher industrial park includes cells where prisoners can be placed in solitary confinement, as shown in a camp diagram found in the Xinjiang Police Files. And the cells are apparently put to use.

According to the files, prisoners are allowed a 10-minute video call with family members every 10 days, but the calls are recorded. If the content of the discussion or the mood of the prisoner is considered to be "abnormal,” officials take "appropriate measures,” the documents note. As a result, most relatives are likely unaware of the sentences their family members are serving. The sentences can only be found in the endless Excel files kept by security officials, sometimes with a picture attached.

The Xinjiang Police Files include a total of 5,074 prisoner photos taken by law enforcement officials in Konasheher between January and July of 2018.

The images from the leak give a face to the reality inside of the camps. Hundreds of faces. Thousands of faces. People staring expressionless into the camera in the poorly lit photos, doubt writ large across their faces, at the mercy of the callous bureaucracy of an inhumane detention camp system.

In March 2012, he and his mother allegedly listened to a one-hour recording that his father had played for them on his mobile phone. The security officials recorded that it was about religious taxes, veiled women and men with beards. He was sentenced on Dec. 25, 2017, to 20 years in prison for planning a terrorist act.

His offense: As an 18-year-old, he is alleged to have spent two weeks training in a fitness studio in the capital of Urumqi. On Oct. 28, 2017, he was arrested and convicted of "planning a terrorist act.” He received a prison sentence of 12 years.

The accusation: In January 2002, as a seven-year-old, he allegedly received illegal religious instruction from his father and in January 2004, he supposedly took lessons in Islam from another man. From 2016 to 2017, he used a VPN service on his mobile phone to circumvent internet censorship – as do hundreds of thousands of Chinese every single day in the rest of the country.

But in Xinjiang, police regularly stop people on the streets to check their smartphones, examine their data and ensure that they have an app installed that can determine if the user has watched any banned videos. Those who have an encrypted messenger like WhatsApp on their phone can expect to be thrown into one of the many camps.

The transformation of Xinjiang into a surveillance state is closely linked with Chen Quanguo, the former party head in the region who is still a member of the powerful Politburo in Beijing. From 2016 to 2021, the 66-year-old headed the administration in Xinjiang. Shortly after he arrived in the region, every resident was required to install the surveillance app on their smartphones. Men were no longer allowed to wear beards and meat markets were required to chain up the hatchets they use for butchering. QR codes are embedded in the blades of their knives.

Before Chen was transferred to Xinjiang, he had been party secretary in Tibet from 2011. He ruled with an iron fist there as well. In Tibet, he sent tens of thousands of party members into the countryside, where they moved into villages, slept in the homes of Tibetan families and alongside monks. Monasteries founded party cells and began flying the Chinese flag.

There is no question that Chen has spent the last several years in Xinjiang establishing a police state. As in Tibet, he brought in party loyalists to live and sleep in the homes of Uyghur families and act as minders.

The Xinjiang Police Files reveal for the first time the brutality of the marching orders he has given his underlings. The leaked documents provide a look into the merciless mindset of the security authorities. In a speech in summer of 2018, the manuscript of which can be found in the data, Party Secretary Chen ordered his officials to constantly be on the alert, to continue pressing the fight against separatists, to strengthen the security of camps and prisons and to shoot all those who try to flee or who attempt to attack one of the detention centers. "First kill, then report,” was the message Chen drummed into his people.

Chen was similarly bellicose in a secret speech delivered in 2017. Every prisoner who even tries to take a few steps toward freedom is to be shot, he intoned. Should anything happen, security forces, he said, were to "shoot all the terrorists dead” so that not a single police officer of member of the public will be injured or killed.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. did not respond to a comprehensive list of questions regarding the Xinjing Police Files, instead sending a statement claiming that it is focused on combatting terrorism, radicalization and separatism in Xinjiang, and that it’s "not about human rights or religion.”

The guards are apparently armed accordingly. One PowerPoint from the Xinjiang Police Files that is marked as classified indicates that the security units in the Tekes camp use QBZ-95 assault rifles, the standard firearm issued to soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army.

Chen, though, has also mandated that significant force be used against normal citizens. Police, he ordered, are to arrest those returning from abroad "as soon as they are seen” and deal with them like "serious criminal offenders.” That means handcuffs, ankle chains and a black hood.

That is likely what would have happened to Abdurahman Hasan. For work, he would regularly travel to nearby Kyrgyzstan from Kashgar, where he lived with his wife and two children, now aged six and seven. Then, Chen arrived in Xinjiang and tightened the rules: Those who had traveled abroad were required to give up their passports. Abdurahman had a bad feeling and left the region in early 2017, leaving behind his family, his soccer team and his life. It was a happy life, says the 47-year-old during an early May interview in a restaurant in the town of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands, where he now lives in a home for asylum seekers.

He lived in exile in complete uncertainty, with no idea of the fates of his wife and children. Was she dead? Reeducated? Locked away? And if so, for how long? Data from the Xinjiang Police Files would provide Abdurahman with bitter clarity.

According to the leaked documents, the so-called Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) – yet another insidious project developed under the auspices of Chen – sounded the alarm. The IJOP is essentially a database fed by officials with information, no matter how insignificant and banal it might seem. When and where someone went to a fitness studio to lift weights. Whether someone has stopped smoking or drinking, or whether they fast during Ramadan. It is highly likely that fingerprints, iris scans and DNA data are also collected. Under the pretext of a free health examination, the state has collected genetic samples from almost every resident of Xinjiang. It is a surveillance nightmare.

Using all the collected data, the IJOP develops algorithms purporting to show how dangerous a citizen of Xinjiang is from the perspective of the state. At least 10,000 people in the Xinjiang Police Files were interned based on such IJOP calculations. One of them was Abdurahman’s wife. On June 25, 2017, when the system raised the warning for the first time, officials left her alone. But two months later, they moved in, and on Dec. 24, 2017, she was sentenced to 16 years in a penal camp. She was convicted of inciting conflict and disturbing the public order by gathering a crowd, according to the files. Her current fate is unknown.

"My God, look what news I’ve been getting. She was sentenced to 16 years?” a distraught Abdurahman asks in the Netherlands. Then, he sees her picture. "Her spirit is broken. It must have been taken around the time of her sentencing. She looks destroyed,” he says. The picture was taken on Jan. 16, 2018, three weeks after she had received her draconian sentence. "I don’t see them as a government,” Abdurahman says of the Chinese authorities. "They function as a terrorist organization.”