Weekly News Wrap

This week in Central Asia, spent nuclear fuel containing enough uranium to produce at least two bombs was safely returned to Russia from Uzbekistan. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was part of the operation, said it was the first time since the break-up of the former Soviet Union that nuclear research fuel had been returned to Russia. Also in Uzbekistan, the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) closed on Monday in compliance with a government order given a month earlier, AP reported on Tuesday. The government had previously accused the refugee agency of protecting ‘criminals and terrorists’ who fled the country after Uzbek security forces violently quelled anti-government protests in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan last May. An Uzbek official accused two Christians of illegal proselytising on Monday, saying followers of the Pentecostal Church and Jehovah’s Witnesses were holding illegal gatherings and conducting private religious lessons in the predominately Muslim country, AP reported. Two days later, AFP reported that the Uzbek police had launched a major crackdown on hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses, accused of organising unauthorised services. Uzbek president Islam Karimov does not permit any religious activity, including Islam, outside state-controlled institutions in the country. Russia’s intelligence service (FSB) said on Thursday that an Uzbek national living in Russia, accused of being a member of the banned Islamic Hizb-ut Tahrir party, had been extradited. He was found guilty of advocating for the party in a mosque in the southern city of Togliatti. He was reportedly expelled for violating Russian immigration laws, AFP reported. In Kazakhstan, authorities said on Wednesday that they had arrested 10 alleged religious extremists who were suspected of planning terrorist attacks, AP reported on Wednesday. The head of the national security committee’s international terrorism department said security personnel had seized parts of explosive devices, maps of potential targets, weapons and religious extremist literature. Also in Kazakhstan, police officers detained 964 foreigners who had been working illegally in the sparsely populated country, according to a report from authorities in the commercial capital, Almaty. Only on Tuesday, 664 foreign citizens were detained after working illegally in the Bostandyk district of Almaty. The detainees’ deportation from the former Soviet republic would be considered by a court, a Kyrgyz news agency reported on Wednesday. A Kazakh court opened the trial of Arat Narmanbetov, a former intelligence officer, accused of insulting the son-in-law of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, by alleging he had ordered the slaying of Altynbek Sarsenbayev, an opposition leader, on 11 February, AP reported on Tuesday. Police have said that the murder was motivated by personal enmity and masterminded by a senior parliament official who had been arrested along with other suspects. The explosion of a landmine on Wednesday in Tajikistan, a country with the largest landmines problem in Central Asia, killed a French mine clearance specialist, Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency reported. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Chairman in Office, Karl De Gucht, expressed his condolences to the mine expert’s family. The Frenchman worked for the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action, which is one of the OSCE’s demining partners, in a dam area on the Panj River closed to the Afghan border. The area is being demined after Tajikistan’s five-year civil war that ended in 1997. At least 15 people have been hospitalised due to a rare disease called leptospirosis in a district 50 km east of the Tajik capital Dushanbe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on Thursday. The cases represent the first outbreak of the disease in this region of Central Asia in more than a decade. The disease spreads through contact with animals or contaminated water. Health officials suspect that the reason behind the reappearance of the disease is recent work on the dilapidated public water supply in the district, RFR/RL reported.