DUSHANBE, November 3, 2009, Asia-Plus — On Tuesday November 3, representatives of the northern city of Chkalovsk and staff members of state unitary enterprise Vostokredmet released an open letter to President Emomali Rahmon over the case of four top managers of the plant who were sentenced to long jail terms.
The letter, in particular, notes that the Vostokredmet’s engineer-in-chief Aleksandr Botov and the facility’s capital construction department head Aleksandr Baboshin had worked with the plant for nearly 40 years. Over the last 18 years, when many specialists had left the country they had remained and continued working on new projects and made considerable contribution to development of gold-mining industry of the country.
All these four persons are honest men and high-skilled professionals that were awarded many government decorations, the letter said.
We hope for your humanism as it was you that granted amnesty to participants of civil confrontations as well as women and minors who had slipped into evil ways for different reasons and ask you to examine the case, the letter noted.
In all, some 500 people singed the letters.
We will recall that a court in the city of Chkalovsk, Sughd province sentenced Shavkat Bobojonov, director of Vostokredmet; Matin Ziyoyev, Vostokredmet’s internal security chief; Aleksandr Botov, the facility’s engineer-in-chief; Aleksandr Baboshin, the facility’s capital construction department head; and Uzbek national Vissarion Ten to long jail terms on October 21.
Shavkat Bobojonov and Matin Ziyoyev were sentenced to 10 years in prison for abuse of power. Botov and Baboshin were sentenced to 22 years each. The sentence followed their conviction on the charges of high treason and abuse of power charges.
The Uzbek national Vissarion Ten got a jail term of 20 years for spying for another state, the source added.
The trial of them began on September 14 this year.
As it had been reported earlier, Botov, Ziyoyev and Baboshin were detained for allegedly spying for Uzbekistan in May this year. The chief of Vostokredmet, Shavkat Bobojonov was arrested on July 22.
The Vostokredmet uranium-reprocessing plant, located in the northern city of Chkalovsk, near Khujand, is included on the list of strategic facilities of Tajikistan. It had produced yellowcake for the Soviet nuclear and defense industries but it lost that capability when Moscow transferred all sensitive equipment at the plant to Russia before the breakup of the Soviet Union.
