courtesy: TOI
Megha Rajagopalan, Indian Origin journalist, along with two contributors has won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reports on the infrastructure built by Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.
Rajagopalan is from Buzzfeed and is among the two Indian-origin journalists who have won the top US journalism award on Friday.
In 2017, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp, and at such a time when China denied for the existence of such places at all, as reported by Buzzfeed News.
Buzzfeed News in its entry for the prize had said, “In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country.”
Rajagopalan working from London and refusing to be silenced, partnered up with two contributors, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek.
Alison Killing is a licensed architect who specialises in forensic analysis of an architecture and satellite images of buildings. Christo Buschek is a programmer that builds tool tailored for data journalists.
Rajagopalan showed gratitude towards the teams of people that worked with her on that matter.
Rajagopalan acknowledged the courage of the sources who spoke to them despite the risk and threat of retaliation against their families and them. She said, “It takes up so much unbelievable courage to do that.”
In the search for the answer of “Where were the Chinese officials detaining as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities?” The team of three set out to analyse thousands of satellite images of Xinjiang region, one by one.
The three compared censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software.
The team ultimately found and identified 260 locations that appeared to be fortified detention camps which were able to hold more than 10,000 people each and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labour.
Being barred from China, Rajagopalan travelled to it neighbour country, Kazakhstan, where she located more than two dozen people who had been prisoners in the Xinjiang camps. There she won the trust and convinced the people to share their nightmarish accounts with the world.