DHAKA: China has reprimanded 15 Xinjiang officials for violations that include adhering to religious faith, state media said on Tuesday, amid a crackdown on what the government calls illegal religious activities in the unruly western region.

One official in the southern city of Kashgar, where a state-backed imam was killed last month, had ‘worshipped openly’, the official Xinhua news agency said, behavior which violated rules that state workers not be religious, reports The Straits Times.

‘The punishment of expulsion from public office was handed to (the official) surnamed Mai who violated the clear regulation that state workers must not have religious faith,’ Xinhua said, citing the city’s Uighur mayor Ainiwaer Tuerxun. Mai had ‘remained devout and incorrigible, and had a poor attitude’, the report added.

Another official was punished, according to Xinhua, for having ‘ambiguous understanding and attitudes, sluggish action, and ineffective implementation toward counter-terrorism operations’.

Punishments for violations, which included spreading information that was harmful to ethnic unity, ranged from expulsion from government positions to stern warnings.

All of the officials were from Kashgar, an old Silk Road city with a largely Uighur Muslim population, though the abbreviated surnames given by Xinhua made their ethnicities unclear.

BDST: 1912 HRS, AUG 19, 2014