Deported advocate for Tajik migrants, Karomat Sharipov was sent to Tajikistan Tuesday night by the flight Moscow-Kulob operated by Russian air carrier S7.
The plane landed at the Kulob airport at 3:00 am today and representatives of the Kulob airport have confirmed that Karomat Sharipov was on the list of passengers who arrived from Moscow by Flight 957.
Nothing is yet known about Karomat Sharipov’s whereabouts.
Recall, the Moscow regional court on December 12 upheld a ruling handed down by the Lyubertsy city court against Karomat Sharipov, according to Russian media reports.
The Lyubertsy city court outside Moscow has ordered the deportation of Karomat Sharipov, who says he has never been a citizen of Tajikistan.
The Lyubertsy court ruled on November 30 that the Federal Security Service (FSB) was right to confiscate Sharipov's Russian passport and that he must be deported to Tajikistan.
Karomat Sharipov was detained in the courtroom following the ruling and he had been held in the detention center for illegal migrants, which is located in the Yegoryevsk district, Moscow oblast.
Sharipov said in October that the FSB had confiscated his passport after claiming it was illegally obtained.
Sharipov contends that he obtained Russian citizenship legally in 1993, after serving in the Soviet and later the Russian Army. He says he never had Tajik citizenship after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.
According to Sharipov, the FSB confiscated his passport after a brawl between Tajik migrant workers and security personnel at a Moscow mall in late September.
Some 250 people, mainly Tajik migrant workers, were detained. Sharipov voiced concerns over legality of such detentions.
Defense lawyer Alesksandra Medvedeva, who represented Sharipov in the trial, says that her client received Russian passport in 2008 legally – that time he received the Russian passport for the second time because he reached 45.
According to her, Sharipov’s children have Russian citizenship and he was paying taxes to the Russian treasury.
