The head of Tajikistan’s Supreme Court said Thursday that three men were given prison terms ranging from two to twenty-six years by a Tajikistani court for trying to assassinate the country’s chief mufti last year.
A person with “hooligan motives” stabbed Sayeedmukarram Abduqodirzoda after a prayer service at a mosque in the Tajik capital Dushanbe in September, causing minor injuries, according to the interior ministry at the time.
At a press conference on Thursday, Rustam Mirzozoda, the chairman of Tajikistan’s Supreme Court, announced that the attacker, a 24-year-old student, had been sentenced to 26 years in prison after being found guilty of terrorism and attempted murder.
A third man was imprisoned for two years for not reporting the crime, and another man was sentenced to thirteen years for terrorism.
Mirzozoda added that investigators had found “signs of extremism in the crime” but did not elaborate.
Approximately 10 million people live in Tajikistan, a landlocked nation surrounded by China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. The Hanafi school of Sunni Islam is practiced by the vast majority of Tajiks.
Since 2010, the 61-year-old Abduqodirzoda has been the head of the Islamic Council of Ulema, Tajikistan’s highest Islamic organization. He is well-known for warning young people not to join radical groups and for criticizing the rise of religious extremism in his sermons.
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Although the militant group known as Islamic State was vanquished in Syria in 2019, its offshoots, such as the Afghan branch, Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), have persisted in their attacks, including a mass shooting at a concert hall close to Moscow last year.
On Thursday, Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin told reporters that the situation at the 1,350-kilometer (843-mile) border with Afghanistan was “under control” and that border guards and Interior Ministry officials were “heavily guarding” the border.
According to him, two militant attacks had been stopped and three had been carried out in Tajikistan in 2024, all in the city of Kulob in the southeast.
Nine inmates who were convicted of having ties to the Jihadi Salafi movement and Islamic State attacked guards at a prison outside of Dushanbe earlier this month in an escape attempt.
