Indian-origin journalist wins Pulitzer for exposing China’s Muslim detention camps

TIL Desk/World/New York/ Megha Rajagopalan, an Indian-origin journalist, along with two contributors has won the Pulitzer Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its restive Xinjiang region.

Rajagopalan from BuzzFeed News is among two Indian-origin journalists who won the US” top journalism award on Friday. Tampa Bay Timesâ Neil Bedi won for local reporting. Bedi along with Kathleen McGrory has been awarded the prize for the series exposing a Sheriffâs Office initiative that used computer modelling to identify people believed to be future crime suspects. About 1,000 people were monitored under the programme, including children.

Bedi is an investigative reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. What Kathleen and Neil unearthed in Pasco County has had a profound impact on the community,  said Mark Katches, Times executive editor. This is what the best investigative journalism can do and why it is so essential. Rajagopalan”s Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category. In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp  at a time when China denied that such places existed.