Opposition politician sentenced to 8.5 years in prison

According to media reports, the Ismoili Somoni District Court in Dushanbe sentenced Nizomidin Nasriddinov, a former member of the “Group 24” movement, to 8.5 years in prison.

44-year-old Nizomidin Nasriddinov had been living in Germany since October 2015, where he and his family received political asylum. In 2017, Nasriddinov introduced himself as a member of the political movement “Group 24” at the annual Warsaw Human Dimension Conference of the OSCE. On January 8 of this year, he was detained by law enforcement authorities in Belarus upon entering the country from Lithuania at the request of the Tajik authorities. Since his detention, he had been held in a pre-trial detention center in the city of Grodno.

On February 21 of this year, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Belarus decided to extradite Nasriddinov to Tajikistan at the request of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Tajikistan. Nizomidin Nasriddinov appealed this decision in court, but his appeal was not upheld.

On July 21, the Belarusian authorities extradited the opposition figure to Tajikistan. At the airport in Dushanbe, he was detained by officers of the State Committee for National Security and taken to the SCNS pre-trial detention center.

According to Radio Ozodi, the trial was open and attended by three of Nasriddinov’s relatives. The convicted individual did not admit his guilt and intends to appeal the verdict in a higher court.