Tajik cyclists’ attackers have allegedly been promised 1 million U.S. dollars. Such rumors are circulating amongst6 residents. Residents of Nurek try avoid contact with police and talking to strangers.
A little more than two weeks have passed since the brutal attack on foreign cyclists in the Danghara district.
In the brutal attack that took place on July 29, a car rammed into the group of cyclists before multiple attackers emerged from the vehicle and stabbed survivors, killing two Americans, a Swiss, and a Dutch national. Three other foreigners were injured in the attack before the assailants sped off.
Of the five men named as attackers, only one – Hussein Abdusamadov — is still alive. He was reportedly arrested early on July 30. Officials said the other four, including brothers Jaffariddin Yusupov, 26, and Asliddin Yusupov, 21, were killed when police tried to apprehend them.
Asliddin and Jaffariddin were residents of Nurek and Asia-Plus reporter went to the city to know more about them. People on the streets feared to speak on this subject and their immediate neighbors said that they did not know that family and those young men…
Asia-Plus reporter met their mothers, Nabotbegim. The interview with her is published the August 16 edition of Asia-Plus.
Meanwhile, Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service says two others of the four dead suspects, Asomiddin Majidov and Zafarjon Safarov, were 19-year-old relatives of Hussein Abdusamadov, the alleged ringleader behind July's deadly attack on foreign cyclists in Danghara district. They were reportedly from the village of Selga in Khatlon province. Both traveled to Russia in late February after failing university entrance exams in 2017. According to Tajik authorities, they had returned to Tajikistan two days before the attack on the cyclists.
According to RFE/RL Tajiks Service, Hussein Abdusamadov spent his early childhood in the village of Selga, in Khatlon province, near Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan. His father died in 1988 when he was 3 years old.
By the early 1990s, as the newly independent Tajikistan descended into civil war, he and his mother and two brothers had resettled in Dushanbe, which had more than half a million residents.
From the age of 10, Abdusamadov attended what was known as the Presidential Lyceum, a prestigious boarding school with long-standing ties to the government and high education standards. After graduation, in 2002, he enrolled in the international relations program at the Tajik State University of Commerce, where he was elected head of the student council.
According to his mother Gulchehra Shodmonova, around that time she noticed Hussein and another son in the company of a local religious man named Nosirkhoja Ubaidov, also known as Qori Nosir. She blamed Qori Nosir — who authorities would subsequently allege was a recruiter and agent for radical Islamists — for influencing her son and convincing him to drop out of university in 2004.
