Mr. Li added: “I hate to think about his wife and two young sons. Tohti’s wife is barely coping. They just had their entire life’s savings of 800,000 renminbi frozen,” an amount equal to $130,000. “How will they live on? How is she going to raise two children all by herself? This family’s tragedy has only begun.”

The Chinese authorities had previously frozen Mr. Tohti’s bank account, ostensibly to investigate the sources of the money. On Tuesday, the court ordered the confiscation of all of his assets.

Mr. Tohti has two sons, ages 5 and 8, who live in Beijing with his wife.

In an emotional telephone interview on Monday night, Ms. Guzelnur said she had not expected the charges to be so harsh and that she had yet to tell her sons about their father’s plight. “I will tell them what happened when they grow up,” she said.

She added: “I’m not worried about my husband’s spirit. It’s his health I worry about. He has heart problems and bad lungs.

“No matter what happens, I will wait for him to come home,” she said. “We will wait forever.”

Mr. Tohti has a daughter from an earlier relationship, Jewher Ilham, who is attending Indiana University in Bloomington, where Mr. Tohti was to have taken up a post as a visiting scholar before the Chinese police prevented him from boarding a plane with Ms. Ilham in February 2013.

The police intensified their scrutiny and harassment of Mr. Tohti after a car crash in October 2013 that killed and injured tourists near Tiananmen Square; Chinese officials said the crash was the work of hostile Uighurs. The police actions culminated in the detention of Mr. Tohti in January.

For years, officials in Xinjiang had been intent on silencing Mr. Tohti, despite the fact that he lived outside of the region, in Beijing, and the Xinjiang government appeared to have been given permission by the central authorities to make its move in 2013, Mr. Tohti’s associates say.