DUSHANBE (Reuters) – A court in Tajikistan has sentenced three men to prison sentences ranging from two to 26 years for attempting to kill the Central Asian republic’s chief mufti last year, the head of the Supreme Court said on Thursday.
Sayeedmukarram Abduqodirzoda suffered minor injuries in September after a person with “hooligan motives” stabbed him following a prayer service at a mosque in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, the interior ministry said at the time.
The perpetrator of the attack, a 24-year-old student, was jailed for 26 years after being found guilty of terrorism and attempted murder, Rustam Mirzozoda, chairman of Tajikistan’s Supreme Court, told a press conference on Thursday.
Another man was given 13 years for terrorism and a third was jailed for two years for failing to report the crime.
Mirzozoda said investigators had concluded there were “signs of extremism in the crime”, without specifying further.
Tajikistan is a landlocked country of some 10 million people sandwiched between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China. The majority of Tajiks are adherents of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam.
Abduqodirzoda, 61, has served as chairman of Tajikistan’s highest Islamic institution, the Islamic Council of Ulema, since 2010. He is known for speaking out against the spread of religious extremism in his sermons, and for urging young people not to join radical groups.
The Islamic State militant group was defeated in Syria in 2019 but splinter groups including Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the Afghan branch, have continued attacks, including a mass shooting at a concert hall near Moscow last year.
Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin told reporters on Thursday the situation at the 843-mile-long (1,350 km) border with Afghanistan was “under control” and the frontier “heavily guarded” by border guards and Interior Ministry officers.
He said three militant attacks had been committed in Tajikistan in 2024, all in the southeastern city of Kulob, and two attacks had been thwarted.
Earlier this month, nine prisoners who had been convicted over links to Islamic State and the Jihadi Salafi movement assaulted guards at a prison outside Dushanbe in an escape attempt, leaving five inmates dead.
(Reporting by Nazarali Pirnazarov; writing by Lucy Papachristou; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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