QURGHON TEPPA, June 6, 2011, Asia-Plus — Qurghon Teppa resident has got a jail term of 3½ years for affiliation with Jamaati Tabligh, a Sunni missionary group.
A court in the city of Qurghon Teppa sentenced local resident Janatullo Abdurahmonov to 3 ½ years in prison at the end of last week. The sentence followed his conviction on charges of public calls for violent change of the constitutional order of Tajikistan (Article 307 (2) of Tajikistan’s Penal Code).
Hasan Muminov, a judge from the Qurghon Teppa city court, says Janatullo Abdurahmonov, who has previous convictions of deliberately inflicting medium bodily injury (Article 111), deliberately inflicting minor bodily injury (Article 112) and beating (Article 116), was detained by security officers in one of local mosques in November 2010. “He was arrested while propagating ideas of Jamaati Tabligh among parishioners,” the judge noted.
“Investigation has established that to recruit new members, Abdurahmonov was propagating ideas of Jamaati Tabligh in the mosque of the village of Navobod in Bokhtar district and in one of mosques in Qurghon Teppa (the capital of Khatlon province),” Muminov said.
According to him, the Khatlon regional court convicted 36 followers of Jamaati Tabligh in December 2009.
We will recall that 56 followers of Jamaati Tabligh, a Sunni missionary group, were convicted in March 2010. The Supreme Court on March 5 ruled that 23 of them be given jail terms of between 3 and 6 years, while the remaining 33 persons be fined in an amount of 1,000 to 2,000 accounts indexes (in 2010, the government determined the accounts index at 35.00 somoni). The sentence followed their conviction on the charges of organization of activity of an extremist organization (Article 307’, Parts 1 and 2 of Tajikistan’s Penal Code). The trial began on December 8, 2009. The trial was held at Dushanbe’s pretrial detention facility # 1 and relatives of some of the convicts say they were not allowed into the courtroom.
Dozens followers of Jamaati Tabligh were detained in a mosque in Dushanbe in April 2009. The same month, several members of this group were also detained in Khatlon’s Baljuvon and Bokhatar districts as well as the city of Qurghon Teppa, the capital of the Khatlon province.
In January 2006, the Supreme Court of Tajikistan banned Jamaati Tabligh together with other nine organizations as extremist on the basis of a suit filed by the Prosecutor-General’s Office.
