 On August 24, 1949 Ehmetjan, Abdulkerim Abbas, Ishaq Beg Munonov, Dalelkhan Sugirbayev, Luo Zhi and other top ETR representatives (11 men in all) boarded a plane in Almaty, the capital of the Kazakh SSR, for Beijing.On September 3, the Soviet Union informed Saifuddin Azizi, another leader of the ETR, who was not on the flight that the plane had crashed near Lake Baikal en route to Beijing, killing all on board.Saifuddin and two other ETR leaders mysteriously dies while travelling to Beijing by plane to attend the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the Chinese Communists' united front conference.