DUSHANBE, May 4, 2011, Asia-Plus — The Supreme Court’s military board has sentenced nine men recaptured after a high-profile jailbreak in Dushanbe last August.
The court completed consideration of criminal proceedings instituted against the recaptured prison escapees and passed sentences on them on May 3. Justice Abdujabbor Sattorov, the head of the Supreme Court’s military board, presided over the trial.
The source at the Supreme Court has confirmed this information but he refrained from giving further information justifying that by saying that the sentence has not yet taken effect.
In the meantime, Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service reports that one of the recaptured prison escapees, Abdurasoul Mirzoyev, brother of ex-commander of Presidential Guards and ex-director of the Drug Control Agency Ghaffor Mirzoyev who was given a life sentence in 2006 on charges of planning a coup d’etat, murder and other grave crimes, has got a jail term of 30 years.
Abdurasoul Mirzoyev’s sister, Oisha Mirzoyeva, told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service that her brother was sentenced to 30 years in prison and he would spend five years of the sentence in a solitary cell.
Abdurasoul moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) before Ghaffor’s arrest and had been living there since, but in January 2010 the UAE extradited him to Tajikistan to stand trial on charges laid out in the 2006 trial of Ghaffor Mirzoyev. Abdurasoul was named as an accomplice in nearly all the crimes for which his brother was convicted and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison in July 2010.
We will recall that the trial of nine recaptured jailbreak fugitives, charged with murder, banditry, illegal weapon possession, and other serious crimes, started on April 1.
The trial that was held behind closed doors also included two persons, who are accused of helping the escapees evade capture or not reporting their whereabouts.
25 convicts serving long jail terms escaped from the State Committee for National Security (SCNS)’s detention facility in Dushanbe in the early hours of morning of August 23 2010, killing four prison guards. Dressing in camouflage, the escapees fled toward eastern Tajikistan. The majority of the fugitives were among 46 people convicted by the Supreme Court on August 19, 2010 of terrorism, drug trafficking, and seeking the forcible overthrow of the government. The escaped prisoners include fourteen Tajik nationals, six Russian citizens, four Afghans, and two Uzbeks. Most were accused of participating in the 2009 armed rebellion in Tavildara.
Eight months after the breakout, four fugitives were killed by security forces and twelve more have been recaptured, and the remaining nine are still at large.
Five of the fugitives, including three Afghan nationals, were arrested in northern Afghanistan on December 19, 2010. Two of them – Hikmatullo Azizov, nicknamed “Kuri Malysh (a mixed expression of Tajik and Russia meaning ‘blind kid’) and Bahromjon Orifov – were extradited from Afghanistan on December 25, 2010. As far as three Afghan nationals who were also escapees from the jailbreak are concerned, Afghanistan wanted to put them on trial.
