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Kazakh authorities on Tuesday handed over an Uzbek refugee to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which said his life would have been in danger if he had been extradited to Tashkent.

Gabdurafikh Temirbayev, detained in June after an extradition request from Uzbekistan, had fled to Kazakhstan in 1999, fearing persecution because of practicing Islam outside of Uzbek state-run mosques, according to UNHCR.

The report came less than a week after Kyrgyzstan, in a serious violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention - of which it remains a party, extradited four Uzbek refugees and one asylum seeker back to Uzbekistan, which had requested their return.

The extradited refugees were among more than 500 Uzbeks who had fled a violent crackdown on dissent in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan in May 2005 and crossed into Kyrgyzstan seeking refuge. Some 430 of them were granted refugee status by UNHCR and airlifted to Romania for third country resettlement in July 2005, while the four who were also granted UNHCR refugee status and one Uzbek asylum seeker from Andijan remained in custody.

Rights groups say that upwards of 1,000 people - mainly unarmed civilians - were killed by government troops. The Uzbek government puts the death toll at 187, saying they were mainly Islamic militants.

"We have grave fears for their safety and have had no word about them since their forced return," Jennifer Pagonis, UNHCR spokeswoman, said in Geneva on Tuesday. Temirbaev and his family left Kazakhstan for third-country resettlement the same day, the UNHCR office in Kazakhstan said.

In Uzbekistan, a prominent Uzbek rights activist, who was sentenced to eight years in prison, had been threatened and tortured, AP reported on Monday, citing the activist's relatives.

Mutabar Tojibaeva, a vocal critic of Tashkent's violent Andijan crackdown, was placed in a psychiatric ward in early June, and officials have threatened to bring new misconduct and insubordination charges against her, her brother Rasul Tojibaev said.

Tojibaeva was convicted in March on more than a dozen charges that she called trumped up. Rasul, who visited Tojibaeva last week for the first time since her conviction, said prison guards had deprived her of sleep, put scissors under her mattress and called her a "finished person, who'll never see freedom again".

Staying in Uzbekistan, the government issued a warning to a weekly tabloid, saying its sex-related articles had offended national sensibilities, the latest in a series of restrictions on mass media in the tightly-controlled ex-Soviet state, AP reported on Monday.

The Uzbek State Agency for Press and Information said in a statement that the editors of the weekly Tasvir had "crossed the line of ethical standards" by frequently running articles not complying with "the mentality of Uzbek people". It wasn't immediately clear whether the warning would be followed by moves to close Tasvir, one of the most popular Uzbek-language publications with a circulation of about 60,000.

Despite an official ban on censorship, Uzbek media remains strictly monitored by government-appointed "consultant editors" and newspapers and magazines are printed on state-owned printing presses. Dozens of foreign media outlets and aid groups have been closed down by authorities over the past year, while state-controlled Internet service providers filter web publications that offer alternatives to the government-approved viewpoint.

Meanwhile, opposition and rights groups in Kyrgyzstan on Thursday accused authorities of excessive use of force and arbitrary arrests in the ongoing hunt for extremists in the country's south, AP reported.

Azimbek Beknazarov, a former chief prosecutor who leads the opposition Asaba party, accused the security services of "dubious actions" and "lawlessness" during operations in the southern Jalal-Abad and Osh provinces.

Kyrgyzstan's human rights ombudsman Tursunbai Bakir Uulu accused the security service of planting weapons and extremist literature on suspects to justify arrests.

Beknazarov also warned that the security clampdown in the south, which had mostly affected the ethnic Uzbek population, might stir ethnic tensions in the volatile Ferghana Valley. The ethnically-mixed valley comprises southern Kyrgyzstan, northern Tajikistan and eastern Uzbekistan and has been a source of tension throughout the region due to poverty and strong fundamentalist sentiment there.

In Tajikistan, the country's highest military court sentenced a former head of the presidential guard to life in prison for sedition and murder, his lawyer told international media on Saturday. The Supreme Court's military branch had found Gaffor Mirzoyev and 15 alleged accomplices guilty of the 1998 murders of two officials and of plotting a coup against Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov, said defence lawyer Abdukayum Yusupov.

Mirzoyev, who commanded the presidential guard for a decade before his dismissal in 2004, has denied all charges, including illegal arms possession and abuse of office. Most of the defendants, but not Mirzoyev, have claimed investigators used physical and psychological pressure to obtain confessions.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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