Later that evening, Otarbai drove a truckload of iron ore about four hundred miles south from Beitun, near the Mongolian border, to a processing plant outside of Ürümqi, Xinjiang’s capital. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism. After two hours, the officers released Otarbai but kept his cell phone, saying that they would review its contents. He hadn’t done anything wrong and wasn’t worried. One officer asked him questions in Chinese: When had he moved to Kazakhstan? For what purpose? With whom did he communicate? Did he go to a mosque? Did he pray? Otarbai answered honestly. There was a metal chair with arm and leg restraints, but the officers didn’t make him sit in it. At the police station, officers led Otarbai to a room lined with spongy, yellow soundproofing. On the morning of August 16th, the county police in Koktokay, near the mine in northern China where he was based, summoned him to a meeting. By August, he had saved up enough to pay his debts. For the next three months, he crisscrossed the region, hauling iron ore in a hundred-ton truck. His wife had recently undergone surgery to remove kidney stones, and he needed money to cover her medical expenses.
In the spring of 2017, Erbaqyt Otarbai, a forty-three-year-old truck driver living in Kazakhstan, crossed the border into China to accept a job with a mining company in Xinjiang.
