Zeynure Hasan was at home in Istanbul in July 2021 when her husband finally called. It had been four days since she last heard from him as he got ready to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been torturous.

But the news Idris now shared with her was even worse. He had been arrested and imprisoned on arrival in Morocco and told he was going to be deported to China. “You should call anyone who can help me, anyone who can rescue me,” he told her, before the phone went dead.

Zeynure, 31, and Idris, 37, are Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group who make up about half of the population of China’s north-western Xinjiang province. More than a million Uyghurs appear to have been imprisoned in “re-education” camps and subjected to torture over the past decade for acts as ordinary as attending a mosque or wearing a hijab.

The couple had joined thousands of others who fled to Turkey in the 2010s. But if they thought they would be safe in exile, they were wrong.

I was told the Chinese government said it would close all its factories in the country if Morocco released him

Settling in Istanbul, Zeynure became an English teacher and Idris started work as a translator and designer, helping to publish Uyghur news and printed works. They had three children and felt free to live as Muslims.

But when one of Idris’s best friends, who worked in a library stocking Uyghur books, was arrested in the summer of 2021, Idris panicked. There were reports that Beijing was pressuring Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt vulnerable as he had been detained previously, he suspected because of his work with activists and promoting Uyghur culture. He decided to flee to Morocco, but Zeynure, whose Chinese passport had expired, had to stay behind with the children until her husband could apply for a visa for both himself and the family.

Leaving Turkey proved to be a terrible mistake. At the airport in Istanbul, border control officials took Idris aside for questioning. “When he was eventually allowed on to the plane he told me how happy he was that they had let him go, but it felt like a trap to me,” says Zeynure. Her worst fears were confirmed when he was taken off the plane and arrested by border officials in Morocco.

Transnational repression is the state-led targeting of refugees, dissidents and ordinary citizens living in exile. It involves the use of electronic surveillance, physical assault, intimidation and threats against family members to silence criticism. The Guardian’s Rights and freedom series is publishing a series of articles to highlight the dangers faced by citizens in countries including the UK.

Over the past decade, China has been using the global police agency Interpol to target political refugees and dissidents and had asked for Idris to be added to the agency’s most-wanted “red notice” list. Zeynure says Turkish officials let him board the flight knowing he would be arrested when he arrived in Morocco.