It was an act of bravery and defiance that was spread around the world at lightning speed by journalists visiting the riot zone: the lone woman hobbling on her crutch towards ranks of paramilitary police, their armoured vehicles retreating as she approached, shaking her fist.

In her tiny basement home in a filthy, crowded tenement yesterday, the mother of two wiped away a tear with the brown and cream headscarf that she was wearing when she faced down China’s security forces.

All she wanted, she told The Times, was the return of her husband and four brothers, who had been rounded up by the authorities and taken away to a detention centre.

“I just hope that he will behave well. He has a heart problem and I worry about him,” Tursun Gul, 30, said.

Her husband, she insists, did not join the thousands of Uighur men who rampaged through the regional capital in what the Government calls the deadliest riots in 60 years of Communist rule. She claims that the building site labourer spent the whole day at home on Monday, only going out to buy vegetables for dinner, as Uighur men set fire to hundreds of cars across the street where they live.

When the police arrived at the scene they ordered everyone into their homes. Li Zhi, the city’s party secretary, said that police moved in after reports of about 100 Uighurs roaming the district with wooden staves, bent on attacking local committee officials.

Many men hid in their houses; some were pulled out from under their beds during a police search. Tursun Gul described how police entered the crowded, slum-like courtyards and ordered the men out. They checked their identity cards. Many were taken out on to the main road, ordered to strip to their underpants and told to lie face down on the ground with their hands behind their heads.

Once all suspects had been detained, they were loaded into trucks and driven off. She has not seen her husband since. Her showdown with the police was a desperate attempt to track him down.

As she stood alone, shaking her fist at the ranks of armed police, Tursun Gul says that she was not afraid. “I thought if they beat me or killed me there were more people behind me who would take my place. I told the police that we wanted freedom and a peaceful life. Just let my five men go.”

On the surface, her action is reminiscent of the man who stopped a column of tanks as troops crushed student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But she — like most Chinese — has never heard of the Tiananmen incident and simply wants her husband back.

Early in the morning she had gone to the police to beg for the return of her husband, Maimaiti, 33. They ignored her and she fainted from rage. An hour later she joined a group of about 300 women who rushed into the street to plead their cause when they saw foreign journalists arriving on a government-organised tour to areas damaged in the riots.

Police arrived and pushed back the women as they screamed for the release of their menfolk.

“The others were all surrounded by police but somehow I slipped through. I found myself alone and just walked towards the police,” Tursun Gul said.

She limped forward, leaning on a crutch and dragging her left leg (she was crippled in a school sports accident when she was 12). She pushed her two index fingers together: “I was as close to them as that.” She remembers shouting: “I don’t want to live. I just want to be free and to have my husband.”

In a breathtaking moment, instead of advancing, the armoured personnel carriers started to back away from their solitary challenger as she shouted and gesticulated. “Do we have law in the country? Do you want to give us a peaceful life or not?”

She said that the fact that she was a woman probably determined the response by the People’s Armed Police, who appear to be under strict orders to exercise the utmost restraint. “I think they felt sympathy for me.”

A senior Uighur officer approached her and tried to calm her, giving her his telephone number.

“He told me to trust them, to trust the Communist Party and everything would be all right.” She left and tried to call him later but there was no answer.

She hopes that the riot will not lead to deeper divisions in her city.

“The Han don’t hate the Uighurs and the Uighurs don’t hate the Han,” she said. “I have sympathy for the Han people who were killed. We need to have ethnic unity.”

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