A mysterious video clip claimed to be of Hada was sent on January 25, 2011 by an unidentified source to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC), a New York based human rights organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of the Mongolian people in China, via its organizational email, webmaster@smhric.org.

The sender’s email address is guiguzi.xuan@gmail.com. The body of the email contained a single sentence in Chinese stating “this is a newly discovered video clip of Inner Mongolian dissident scholar Hada, hope you will take this serious and pay attention to it!” No information about the sender is shown in the email. The video clip was contained in an attachment with a file name of 1号外出.MWV (file name meaning “No.1 Out”). Shortly after, the same video clip was published on YouTube and Boxun News, an overseas Chinese language online news site.

Blurry and silent, the 37 second long video clip consists of two parts. In the first part, a man in black followed by a black car, looks to both sides and back and walks in from what appears to be a side entrance and proceeds upstairs; in the second part, the same man walks into a luxury lobby, possibly of a hotel. The stillness of the images in the first part suggests that it was taken most probably by a security video camera; the unstable frames and the direction of the second part suggest it was taken manually by someone in the corner of the lobby.

Due to the poor quality and shortness of the video, it is difficult to conclusively identify the man as Hada, a prominent Mongolian political prisoner who disappeared after his scheduled release date,  December 10, 2010, although there is some resemblance from the body shape and facial contours .

Hada, a Mongolian dissident and founder of a banned organization, the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance (SMDA), was sentenced to 15 years in jail in 1996 by the Chinese authorities for charges of “splitting the country and engaging in espionage”. Hada has gone missing since his scheduled release date along with his wife Xinna and son Uiles who were taken into custody by police a week before the scheduled release date. Relatives of Hada have been cut off from outside contact since December 18, 2010.

In the past two months alone, at least five other Mongolian dissidents and activists who had direct or indirect connections to Hada have either been put under house arrest or forcibly disappeared.