Khairullo Mirsaidov, the head of the Khuand-based KVN team, who was detained on December 5, is still being held at the pretrial detention facility in Khujand, the capital of the northern Sughd province.
His defense lawyer is expected to meet with him today.
Recall, criminal proceedings have been instituted against Khairullo Mirsaidov under the provisions of four articles of Tajikistan’s Penal Code: Article 245 (4) – embezzlement or misappropriate of state funds; Article 189 (2) – inciting national, racial, regional or religious enmity; Article 340 (1) — document forgery; and Article 346 (2) – false denunciation.
A source close to the investigation says the most serious article is Article 189 (2) – inciting national, racial, regional or religious enmity. “This article was probably applied for any joke that could seem to somebody to be bad,” the source noted.
Ms. Gulchehra Ghoibnazarova, a spokeswoman for the Sughd prosecutor’s office, says criminal proceedings have been instituted against Khairullo Mirsaidov on the basis of materials posted on the Internet by Mirsaidov himself and an application by Olim Zohidzoda, the head of the on Sughd department for sports and youth affairs.
Neither the Sughd prosecutors nor Khairullo Mirsaidov’s defense lawyer managed to answer what for Mirsaidov faces charges of incitement of national, racial, regional or religious enmity.
Mirsaidov’s defense lawyer says he has not yet meet with his client.
Last month, Khairullo Mirsaidov officially appealed to President Emomali Rahmon, Prosecutor-General Yusuf Rahmon, and Sughd Governor Abdurahmon Qodiri, informing them of what he said was extortion by local authorities in Sughd.
Mirsaidov said that local officials who helped him secure budget funds for an improvisational comedy team to travel to Moscow to compete on a program called KVN demanded a $1,000 bribe, which he said he refused to pay.
Meanwhile, the Khujand-based KVN team had been due to attend a competitive event in Moscow this month and a KVN festival in Sochi in January next year. Failure to attend the latter event could see the Khujand KVN team excluded for a year from the official KVN league.
KVN (a Russian abbreviation for the Club of the Funny and Inventive People) is a Russian-speaking humor TV show and competition where teams compete by giving funny answers to questions and showing prepared sketches, that originated in the Soviet Union. The program was first aired by the First Soviet Channel on November 8, 1961. Eleven years later, in 1972, when few programs were being broadcast live, Soviet censors found the students' impromptu jokes offensive and anti-Soviet and banned KVN. The show was revived fourteen years later during the Perestroika era in 1986, with Alexander Maslyakov as its host. It is one of the longest-running TV programs on Russian Television.
During the Perestroika era, KVN spread to Russian expatriate communities around the world. In 1992 the Israel team tested the waters playing against the CIS team. The game was an unquestionable success and more international games on a highest level followed: the CIS team visited Israel, Germany and USA. The culmination was in 1994 with the First KVN World Festival in Israel with 4 teams (USA, Israel, CIS and Germany).
