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FILE -- An internment camp near Harmony New Village, a farming settlement in the Xinjiang region of China, Aug. 4, 2019.GILLES SABRIÉ/The New York Times News Service

A Uighur woman living in the Netherlands said she helped leak secret Chinese government documents that shed light on how Beijing runs mass detention camps for Muslim ethnic minorities, recounting how she has lived in fear after receiving death threats for speaking out.

Asiye Abdulaheb, 46, told a Dutch newspaper that she was involved in the release of 24 pages of documents published by Western news outlets last month and was speaking out now to protect relatives from retaliation.

The documents, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and examined by journalists around the world, followed an earlier leak of 403 pages of internal papers to The New York Times that described how authorities created, managed and justified the continuing crackdown on as many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs.

“I can handle the pressure, but I’m afraid that something will happen to my children and their father,” she told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. “Publicity gives us protection.”

Abdulaheb said that she had worked for Chinese state institutions and moved to the Netherlands in 2009.

In an interview Saturday, she confirmed that she received and helped leak the 24 pages, but she did not explain how she obtained the documents.

The Dutch newspaper reported that Abdulaheb had acquired the 24 pages of internal Chinese documents on her laptop this year. After she posted a screenshot of one of the documents on Twitter, a German researcher on Xinjiang, China — Adrian Zenz — reached out to her and confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

Those documents were later acquired by various news organizations.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an independent nonprofit based in Washington, later partnered with 17 other organizations to publish revelations on internment camps based on the 24-page set of documents.

In a statement Saturday, the consortium declined to say whether Abdulaheb was the source for its report. “ICIJ does not comment on its sources,” it said.

The two exposés sharpened international debate over the Chinese government’s intense crackdown across the region. Since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party has overseen a wave of mass detentions in Xinjiang, driving up to 1 million members of largely Muslim minority groups, especially Uighurs, into indoctrination camps intended to drastically weaken their religious attachments and make them loyal to the party.

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