DUSHANBE, January 13, 2012, Asia-Plus – Arkady Dubnov, a reporter for the Moskovskiye Novosti (Moscow News) newspaper, is sure that attack on Dodojon Atovulloyev was hired from Dushanbe.
“I am sure it was not squaring of private accounts; it was a contract attack. He has annoyed official Dushanbe for along time and it is necessary to seek the trace of those who hired this attack in Tajikistan,” Dubnov told Asia-plus in an interview Friday afternoon.
According o him, he was one of the last people to talk to the wounded Dodojon. “He told me that an active shadowing was organized against him in recent days. They constantly phoned him and demanded a meeting with him. That is all he told me before physicians prohibited him from speaking,” Dubnov said.
According to the Russian reporter, Dodojon Atovulloyev is now in serious but stable condition.
We will recall that a Moscow-based Tajik opposition journalist Dodojon Atovullo (Atovulloyev) was attacked near the Viaggio Italian Restaurant Thursday, between 9:00 and 10:00 pm. According to some sources, an unknown man of Asian appearance attacked the journalist and inflicted two stab wounds on him. Dodojon Atovullo was rushed to the Sklifosovsky Emergency Medicine Institute in serious condition.
Russia’s news agency, Itar Tass, reported on January 13 that police said he was attacked in a Moscow restaurant where another man approached him and “stabbed him with a knife after which the victim was hospitalized with a grave wound.” Police said one of the versions of the attack was “domestic conflict.”
Dodojon Atovullo, 56, an exiled opposition journalist and outspoken critic of the Tajik government. He runs an independent Tajik-language publication
Charoghi Rouz
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Atovulloyev was forced to leave Tajikistan in 2001 after being accused of insulting the president and “inciting national, racial, and religious hatred.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported in 2008 that according to Tajik press reports, “the Interior Ministry issued an arrest warrant in September for Dodojon Atovullo… and the Prosecutor-General’s instituted criminal proceedings against Atovullo on the charges of “public calls to a violent change in the constitutional regime,” along with defamation and “public insult of the president.”
In 2011, Tajikistan’s Prosecutor’s General again instituted criminal proceedings against Atovullo and sent an extradition request to the Russian authorities but the Russian authorities refused the extradition request.
