Indian-Origin Journalist Wins Pulitzer Prize For Exposing China’s Detention Camps For Muslims

In recognition of the proliferation of citizen journalism in the internet age, teenaged non-journalist, Darnella Frazier, was awarded a Pulitzer Special Citation for her courage in filming the killing of George Floyd, the African-American who died in police custody in Minneapolis last year.

The video clip made on her smartphone went viral and set off prolonged nationwide protests against police brutality and led to measures in many states and cities to reform policing.

The sight of a policeman kneeling on the neck of dying Floyd as he repeated, “I can’t breathe”, appealed to America’s conscience and led to a broader consideration of the problems faced by African-Americans.

The Board said her that her video “spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice”.

Rajagopalan and her colleagues used satellite imagery and 3D architectural simulations to buttress her interviews with two dozen former prisoners from the detention camps where as many as a million Muslims from Uighur and other minority ethnicites were interned.

“I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” she said.

According to the publication, she and her colleagues, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek, identified 260 detention camps after building a voluminous database of about 50,000 possible sites comparing censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software.