Rahile Omer

Rahile Omer was a Uyghur woman from Kashgar Prefecture, in China's Xinjiang region, who became known internationally as the youngest documented detainee in the leaked Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of internal Chinese police records exposed in 2022. According to reconstructions based on those files, she was born on 25 April 2003 and

she later resided in Suluk Village, Langar Township, Konasheher County, Kashgar Prefecture

.

She died at 23 in a prison in Peyzivat county, local officials told Radio Free Asia

, in the autumn of 2026, after roughly nine years spent in detention, internment and prison beginning when she was still a child.

A photograph dated March 20, 2018, reportedly shows Omer at a vocational training facility in Konasheher (Shufu) County

, part of the network of internment camps China built across Xinjiang.

Internal documents note that she was initially spared immediate detention because she was only a 14 year old, non adult student

, but

authorities reverse course and formally take 14-year-old Rahile into custody

in September 2017.

In 2019, state authorities determine that Rahile has failed to transform

, the state's term for detainees deemed insufficiently compliant with re-education.

Upon reaching the age of majority at 18, Rahile is formally brought before a court and sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of gathering a crowd to disturb social order, in October 2021

, and

authorities transferred her to a prison in Peyzivat County

to serve her term.

Her case mattered because it put a face on the scale and the youth of those swept into China's Xinjiang detention system.

Researcher Adrian Zenz wrote that the youngest photographed person in the files was a Uyghur girl named Rahile Omer who was first detained when she was only 14 years old

. Human rights advocates and Uyghur diaspora groups repeatedly cited her story as evidence of what they describe as a genocide against Uyghurs, a characterisation China has rejected.

News of her death did not come from a Chinese government announcement.

News of Omer's death first emerged on October 25, 2026, when a Chinese language X account reported that she had died, citing online reports published the previous day, and alleged that she had died from severe depression and that both of her parents had died in prison

.

UygurHaber, a Turkish language Uyghur news site, reported on a Monday that Rahile Omer, detained at 14, had died in custody, citing no source for the death

. Radio Free Asia subsequently obtained confirmation from local officials that

she died in a prison in Peyzivat county, serving a 12 year sentence

.

Her death prompted swift reaction from Uyghur advocacy organisations, including condemnation from the East Turkistan Government in Exile, which described it as part of an ongoing Uyghur genocide. As of this writing, Chinese authorities have not issued any public statement on the exact circumstances of her death, and no official cause of death has been confirmed.