Head of the Tursunzoda forensic medical examination department has been arrested on suspicion of releasing a false forensic report.
According to the Interior Ministry’s website, a 62-year-old head of the Tursunzoda forensic medical examination department has been arrested on suspicion of releasing a false forensic report about murder of local 16-year-old girl.
Criminal proceedings have reportedly been instituted against him and an investigation is under way.
In early February, two teenagers raped the 16-year-old girl M.I. before stabbing her to death and setting her body alight.
The tragedy took place in Tursunzoda, some 60 kilometers west of Dushanbe, on February 3.
The head of the Tursunzoda forensic medical examination department released a forensic report that the girl had allegedly committed suicide by self-immolation, though there were multiple stab wounds on her body…
According to the victim’s relatives, police summoned her father and said that the girl could commit suicide following domestic violence. She allegedly poured gasoline on herself and set fire to herself.
The family took the case to the Prosecutor-General's Office, prompting a criminal probe that began with the exhumation of her body.
According to prosecutors, forensics concluded that the girl had been raped and stabbed 14 times before her body was burned.
Prosecutors reportedly investigated possible negligence in the handling of the case by regional police, including a lack of proper forensics.
The records of the victim's mobile phone led to the arrest of the two suspects.
The 16-year-old M.I. was allegedly lured out of her grandparent's house in the village of Seshanbe.
“She received a phone call from her classmates at around midnight,” the victim's grandparents told RFE/RL's Tajik Service on February 17. “The classmates asked her to come out just for a brief moment because they wanted to ask her something. Only five minutes after she left, we got worried and went out to look for her. But she wasn't outside.”
The family says they looked for the girl all night before notifying police. Her burned body was reportedly found two days later, dumped in a remote field in the Joura Rahmonov jamoat 9 kilometers away.
The rate of juvenile crimes evokes serious concern in Tajik society. In a speech made on February 15, President Emomali Rahmon noted that young people and teenagers were responsible for some 75 percent of the 3,000 hooliganism crimes recorded in the Tajik capital in the past 10 years.
Tajikistan has adopted a so-called parental responsibility law that holds parents liable for crimes committed by their underage children.
The rise in crimes committed by Tajik youth has been widely blamed on widespread unemployment and poverty in the country.
