The United States has demanded “serious consequences” over reports of systematic rape and torture of women taking place inside China’s camps for the Uighur Muslim minority.
The US state department said that it was “deeply disturbed” by the “atrocities”.
It was responding to a BBC article based on interviews with former detainees and a guard.
China’s foreign ministry strongly denied the “false report”.
The article detailed allegations of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture with the internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.
According to independent estimates, more than a million people have been detained in the camps, which China says exist for the “re-education” of Uighurs and other minorities.
One woman who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US told the BBC that women were removed from their cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men.
She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.
A Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was detained for 18 months in the camp system said she was forced to strip Uighur women naked and handcuff them, before leaving them alone with Chinese men.
A guard at one of the camps, who spoke on condition of anonymity, detailed allegations of torture.
Adrian Zenz, a leading expert on China’s policies in Xinjiang, said the testimony gathered for the BBC story “confirms the very worst of what we have heard before”.
A US state department spokesman said: “We are deeply disturbed by reports, including first-hand testimony, of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang”.
“These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences.”
Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne also commented on the report, saying the United Nations should be given “immediate” access to the region.
“We consider transparency to be of utmost importance and continue to urge China to allow international observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, to be given immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang at the earliest opportunity,” she said.
Human rights groups say the Chinese government has gradually stripped away the religious and other freedoms of the Uighurs, culminating in an oppressive system of mass surveillance, detention, indoctrination, and even forced sterilisation.
China has consistently denied allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and said the camps were not detention camps, but “vocational educational and training centres”.
On Wednesday, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the BBC of making a “false report” that was “wholly without factual basis”.
