Eurasianet reports that the public in Tajikistan knows all too well that police officers are far from always on their side.
But a few recent high-profile incidents reprotedly are serving to deepen that distrust. Far from solving crimes, police are increasingly the ones committing them, according to Eurasianet.
Over the summer, Akmal, a 35-year-old taxi driver, was out on the road when his car was scraped by a fellow motorist who turned out to be an Interior Ministry officer. As Akmal told Eurasianet, the policeman was driving fast and lost control of his vehicle.
In the weeks that followed, Akmal tried but failed to get any compensation to repair his taxi.
Such episodes do not shock Tajiks anymore. The worry is that the brazenness may be getting worse and that individual police officers are growing more impudent in their conduct.
Muhammad, a 15-year-old from Dushanbe, lives in a neighborhood in the vicinity of a police precinct. He told Eurasianet that one officer, whom he identified by the name Fayzullo, spotted him a few times on the street and decided to enlist him as his personal assistant.
Fayzullo purportedly kept demanding that Muhammad bring him drinks and food, or face ominous consequences for refusing his orders.
“If I refused to do something, he said that they had my photo, and that he ‘knows what to do with me,’ which meant that that he could throw me into jail. He also said that if my parents intervened on my behalf, then the police would deal with them too,” Muhammad told Eurasianet.
The people who spoke to Eurasianet for this story all did so on strict condition of anonymity over fears that they could face reprisals.
On one occasion, a relative of Muhammad’s spotted him chatting with Fayzullo. After learning what had been happening, they reached out to the prosecutor’s office and other state bodies for assistance.
In some instances, the aberrant behavior is impossible to hide.
On June 21, an officer with the State Traffic Inspectorate of the Interior Ministry, Orzubek Khabibzoda, was driving his service car at more than 100 kilometers per hour when he veered into the oncoming lane and collided with a Mercedes. The accident caused death of the Mercedes driver and his three passengers.
In another episode in Dushanbe on July 13, Akmal Yusufzoda, a high-ranking officer in the same ministry’s organized crime department, kidnapped a university lecturer in a fit of jealousy – Yusufzoda’s wife worked at the same place as his victim – and later threw him into the Zarafshon River.
In some cases there is pushback. In May, residents of the Istaravshan district, in northern Tajikistan, surrounded and attacked three police officers who they allege were trying to drive away with a 15-year-old girl with the intention of sexually abusing her.
This week, four of the alleged attackers were sentenced to between two-and-a-half and three years in prison, one received a two-year suspended sentence, and one was fined the equivalent of $2,000, Eurasianet reported on October 6.
No incident has proven more notorious than the kidnapping and murder of local banking executive Shuhrat Ismatulloyev in June. Investigators eventually learned that current and former police officers and prosecutor service employees were behind the botched ransom plot.
Even the authorities are unable to disguise the problem.
Speaking at a press conference in August, Interior Minister Ramazon Rahimzoda revealed that 23 Interior Ministry personnel had been detained on suspicion of committing a crime in the previous six months.
