Tajik nationals serving sentences on false espionage charges in Uzbek prisons ask for a review of their cases.
Despite improved relations between the two countries, dozens of Tajik nationals unjustly accused of espionage are still held in Uzbek prisons.
Since President Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power in Uzbekistan in 2016, relations between Tashkent and Dushanbe have warmed considerably, ending years of cold confrontation and resuming cooperation in various spheres. Long-standing social and political problems were resolved, trade and economic cooperation expanded, borders were opened, and transportation links were restored.
However, some problems remained unresolved, in particular, the improvement of relations between the countries did not affect the fate of citizens unjustly accused of espionage and serving their sentences in Uzbek prisons.
At the same time, those intelligence officers who fabricated cases against these citizens and illegally persecuted them are already serving sentences in Uzbekistan’s penal colonies.
CABAR.asia has a list of 25 Tajik citizens and stateless persons detained and charged under Article 160 of the Criminal Code of Uzbekistan and Article 157 of the Criminal Code of Uzbekistan. Some of them have already died, the rest are serving their remaining sentences in penal colonies in Uzbekistan. The list was compiled based on the accounts of relatives who contacted us, as well as from conversations with convicts serving sentences in penal colonies in Uzbekistan and their lawyers.
Relatives and lawyers of the accused are certain that most of the cases against them were fabricated during the cooling of relations between the two countries and are not true.
During the reign of President Islam Karimov, when relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan deteriorated sharply, spy mania flourished. The media of both countries periodically reported that the special services had detained people accused of spying in favor of one side or the other.
It is difficult to say how true this was, but lawyers who took part in the trials and defended the accused during those years say that many of them were unfairly accused and that the cases against them were not reviewed and numerous appeals and complaints were ignored.
The Erdanovs’ case
Abdugani Erdanov, 65, a citizen of the Republic of Tajikistan and an Uzbek by nationality, was born and raised in Khatlon Oblast. After the collapse of the USSR, fleeing the civil war in Tajikistan (1992-1997), he moved with his family to the Surkhandarya region of Uzbekistan and worked there as a farmer. In 2013, the National Security Service of Uzbekistan accused him, along with his sons and nephews, of espionage. A total of six people from this family were on trial. They were accused of obtaining secret documents from military units located in Uzbekistan and transferring them to the Tajik government. The Erdanov family was found guilty of espionage under Article 160 of the Criminal Code of Uzbekistan. All six were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 20 years.
The head of the family, Abdugani Erdanov, received 17 years in prison and has already served 10 of them. Almost all members of the family are still in penal colonies. Two of his nephews died in prison.
“We are from Tajikistan with my 5 children. Our family came to Uzbekistan and lived here by farming and doing business. In January 2013, all our family members were taken away by the National Security Service. At that time we were persecuted by the National Security Service under the leadership of Nadir Turakulov. He persecuted not only us, but also all citizens coming from Tajikistan or traveling to Tajikistan,” Erdanov told CABAR.asia.
He described the many difficulties and injustices he faced during the criminal case against his family, and the torture he and his relatives were subjected to.
“My first nephew was taken from his home by unknown people. A week later we learned that he was taken away by the National Security Service. After that, the NSS officers took my son as well. My nephew and my son, Erdanov Ravshan, were arrested and charged under Article 160. Then I went to the regional National Security Service, but there was no result. I did not know what to do. A month later, unknown people grabbed me on the street and took me away. They put a black bag on my head. They took me and said: “Because you are a traitor to the country”. They took me to a cold and dark room and locked me there. They caused me a lot of pain. My head was exploding, they broke my legs and arms,” he says.
Erdanov says that despite being uninvolved in all the false accusations, the investigators, Colonels Orziev and Nadir Turakulov, using torture and threats, forced them to plead guilty to spying for Tajikistan.
“He said that if I accepted all the blame, there would be an indulgence for me and my son. He asked me which servicemen I was related to. No matter how much I told them that I could have no connection with military personnel, I was forced to plead guilty. I complained to the city court, but there I was sentenced to go to jail for a month. Then they didn’t even give me food, tortured me with electric shocks. They [SNB investigators] said that you will take over the information we recorded. All the accusations were slanderous. He threatened that if you did not admit these accusations, they would insult our daughters-in-law, our daughters and my wife. For 4 months I was physically tortured and electrocuted on a daily basis. After four months I was taken to the regional court and sentenced to 17 years in prison under Article 160. My son was sentenced to 5 years, and several other relatives were sentenced to imprisonment for more than 15 years,” Erdanov recalled.
His wife, daughters and grandchildren were deported from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan in 2014.
Abdugani Erdanov says he disagrees with the 2014 court verdict. He appealed it several times, but to no avail.
“On January 16, 2014, my sons and I were taken to Tosh prison in Tashkent region. In that prison we were also subjected to great physical pressure and torture. We were kept in the stone prison for 24 days. Then we were sent to Jaslyk (a colony in Karakalpakstan). We stayed in Jaslyk for more than five years, and we were also subjected to suffering there,” Erdanov said.
Torture against him stopped only after Shavkat Mirziyoyev became president in 2016. After serving a third of his 17 years, he was transferred to Surkhandarya Province, to a colony in the town of Sherabad, 60 kilometers north of the city of Termez.
“Now the colony in Sherabad is the place of my punishment, the rest of my sentence is here. Disagreeing with the sentence, we repeatedly appealed to all instances. But there has been no positive result. I have been asking the President of Uzbekistan for several years to listen to us,” he said.
Unsuccessful attempts to prove the innocence of their relatives
The arrest and sentences of the Erdanov family have worsened the situation of their families in Tajikistan.
We managed to contact Barno Erdanova, Abdugani’s sister, who has been trying unsuccessfully for ten years to secure the release of her brother and son from Uzbek prison.
Erdanova, 63, is a resident of the Dusti district of Khatlon Oblast. She said that in addition to her brother, Uzbek authorities arrested her son and two nephews in 2013 on charges of spying for Tajikistan. Two women from the family were also accused of espionage.
Barno’s son, Erkinjon Erdanov, 43, moved to Uzbekistan with his family in 2005, where he worked as a cab driver. He transported passengers passing through the Gulbahor border crossing in Termez district of Surkhandarya province. According to his mother, Erkinjon, together with his wife and three children, obtained a residence permit in Uzbekistan at that time.
Recalling those tragic days of January 2013, Barno Erdanova says that the Uzbek Security Service was the first to arrest her son on the basis of some woman’s testimony.
“That woman slandered my son, saying that she had allegedly sent some papers through my son. And then they announced on Uzbek television that we tried to send a bomb from this side by airplane but failed,” she said.
Barno Erdanova said that 15 days after her son’s arrest, SNB officers arrested her nephew and another nephew 15 days later. Her brother Abdugani Erdanov was the fourth person arrested from the family. “My son told me then that they put a blank sheet of paper in front of him and forced him to sign it, otherwise they threatened to bring his three daughters and wife. They forced my son to sign that paper,” Barno Erdanova added.
According to her, her son Erkinjon Erdanov spent the first five years in a prison in Karakalpakstan, and in 2018 he was taken to one of the prisons in Surkhandarya region. It was not until 2020 that his mother was able to visit him.
She says that she has appealed to the Uzbek authorities several times to get the case reviewed and prove the innocence of her son and brother. But there is no result.
“I want my son to be released, to come to Tajikistan. The SNB officers who handled the case against my son and brother are themselves arrested. Why are they not reviewing their case?” – asks Barno Erdanova.
The cases were fabricated according to a well-established scheme
Another of those accused of espionage who served 10 of the 17 years he was sentenced to based on the fabricated case against him in 2013 is businessman Zafar Rakhmatov, a citizen of Tajikistan. From 1998 to 2013, he ran a small business, buying household goods in Tashkent and selling them in Tajikistan.
“I was selling equipment that I brought from Tashkent to Tajikistan. Later the borders were closed. It became difficult to get a visa to Uzbekistan,” he says.
According to Zafar, in 2013, during another border crossing, a representative of the National Security Service asked him for information about citizens coming to Uzbekistan from Tajikistan. He had no information about these people, so he refused to do so.
On April 24, 2013, he was detained in the city of Bekabad by masked men, taken to a dark room and tortured for a long time. He says they kept him there for two months. Then the investigation began.
“I wasn’t even given a lawyer. I was tortured for 7 months. After 7 months, SNB officers said that if you write down the data you gave us, we will leave you alone, otherwise the torture will continue. At first, a criminal case was opened against me under Article 223 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan on illegal border crossing. In September 2013, the investigator of the National Security Service Nadir added the 160th article of the Criminal Code. During the interrogation, the investigator himself asked someone on the phone for the names of military units and then dictated them to me. I signed it. He said that it would be difficult for you if you did not write down the information we dictated to you. After much physical torture, I had to write down what the investigator dictated to me. Allegedly, I passed information about some military unit to the Republic of Tajikistan,” Rakhmatov recalled.
He said he was confused, tortured and pressured by the investigator, and thought that by writing what he was told he would find a lawyer and be able to prove his innocence in court. However, this did not happen. The military court found him guilty.
“No one heard me in court. I was not even given a court verdict to hand. I was innocently guilty. I was sentenced to 17 years in prison,” he says.
He spent six years in one of the worst prisons, Jaslyk in Karakalpakstan, which was shut down on the orders of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2019. In November 2020, he was brought to Manzil Colony No. 48 in Tashkent Region, where he is serving the remainder of his sentence.
According to Zafar, over 10 years he has repeatedly sought help from many organizations, including in Tajikistan, but has not received positive results.
“I have been in prison for 10 years. I have to spend another 7 years in prison. I also applied to the Tajik embassy in Uzbekistan, but there was no positive result. Now relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have improved. I believe that now there will be a positive result,” Rakhmatov said.
Since 2017, torture in prisons has stopped, he said. He personally knows 44 Tajik citizens serving sentences under Article 160 of the Criminal Code. Among them are 15 women.
Another of our interlocutors, 54-year-old Zainiddin Alimov, a citizen of the Republic of Tajikistan, is also currently serving a 14-year sentence in general regime colony No. 36 in the Navoi region of Uzbekistan.
He was arrested in October 2015 when he was returning from Uzbekistan after participating in a travel fair where the travel agency Kol, where he worked, had signed contracts with many international companies. Prior to that, working for another travel company, he had traveled to Uzbekistan every year for five years to participate in this fair. His job duties also included collecting visa documents for Tajik citizens wishing to travel to Uzbekistan.
He was arrested according to a well-established scheme. On October 7, when he was returning to Tajikistan through the border town of Bekabad, SNB officers detained him at the border crossing and then forced him under torture and abuse to sign a confession to spying for Tajikistan.
“On March 5, 2016, I was found guilty without any grounds, based on speculation and suspicion, under Article 160 of the Criminal Code and a number of other articles and sentenced to 14 years and 3 months. I was found guilty without any grounds. The trial was held in Russian. They did not pay attention to the fact that I informed them that I did not know Russian,” he says.
Investigators who fabricated cases against businessmen and ordinary citizens have been convicted, but the people who suffered from their actions are not justified
Abdugani Erdanov said all the cases against his family were fabricated by SNB representatives in Surkhandarya Oblast to please the demands and policies of then-President Islam Karimov.
“We were unjustly imprisoned, I have already served 10 years here. I have 17 grandchildren. I was never a spy! […] We were convicted in court without any evidence. We were accused of allegedly infiltrating military units, taking their secret documents and handing them over to the Tajik government. But how could we, ordinary citizens, gain access to military units? Think about it, how could we have gotten these documents? The court, the prosecutor and the lawyers know that we are innocent. But we were found guilty by order of the NSS,” says Abdugani Erdanov.
Many former National Security Service officers have been arrested and prosecuted for lawlessness and abuse of power.
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, during his visit to Surkhandarya region on January 19-20, 2018, sharply criticized the activities of employees of the National Security Service of the region. Many of them were then dismissed from their posts and imprisoned.
The former investigator Nadir Turakulov, mentioned by Abdugani Erdanov, was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The media reported about Turakulov’s sentence handed down by the military panel of the Supreme Court on November 25, 2018. During his activities in Surkhandarya region, he and his partners were involved in such crimes as seizure of business of not only local but also foreign entrepreneurs, violence against citizens and kidnapping, organization of drug trafficking in the cities of Denau and Termez, etc.
Together with him, criminal cases were brought against 12 other employees of the Surkhandarya Region SNB (State Security Agency).
“What could we, lawyers, do?”
According to human rights defenders, in those times of rampant impunity of the NSS structures, justice was out of the question. Fearing persecution, intimidation and pressure, lawyers could not prove the innocence of ordinary citizens. They are sure that all these people were victims of the policy of those years, when relations between the two countries deteriorated greatly.
Akhmed Kayumov, chairman of the Surkhandarya Oblast Bar Association, said that between 2009 and 2016, hundreds of innocent Tajik citizens were sentenced to long prison terms because of the politics of those years.
“That was the policy at the time – Tajik citizens were imprisoned and charged with espionage based on conjecture and suspicion,” he says.
“I have acted as defense counsel for many Tajik citizens convicted under Article 160. One of such cases – a Tajik citizen transported people from Tajikistan to the border with Uzbekistan in a Damas car. This man does not know any state secrets. He could not even spell his name correctly. How can he know military secrets and transfer them to another country if he was an ordinary driver?” – he adds.
Kayumov notes that all the prosecutors, lawyers and judges knew that these men were innocent. But the trial was always one-sided.
“The documents we presented were completely ignored in court. Even in 2015, even though I said that these people were innocent, they were not taken into account during the trial. The court chairman also followed the orders of the security officers,” he says.
As for the case of the Erdanov family, Kayumov believes that they are innocent and were unjustly imprisoned for long terms.
Tursunoy Gaforova, a lawyer for dozens of people arrested on espionage charges, agrees.
” […] How many innocent people have been imprisoned as spies. How many of our women sat in jail being innocent. Between 2010 and 2016, investigations were conducted by NSC investigators. What could we, lawyers, do? How many Tajik citizens died in prison …,” she said.
She lamented that the former investigators of the National Security Service who conducted the investigation have been punished and are also in prison, but the people unjustly convicted by them remained unjustified.
“The cases of those convicted under Article 160 of the RU Criminal Code have not been reviewed so far. None of them have been acquitted,” notes lawyer Tursunoy Gaforova.
Akhmed Kayumov believes that the courts are hesitant to review all cases of unfair sentences under Article 160 precisely because it is related to interstate relations and because of the gravity of the charge.
“Now all cases of those [unjustly] convicted under articles 167 of the RU Criminal Code (embezzlement by embezzlement) and 168 of the RU Criminal Code (fraud) have been reviewed and acquitted. But those convicted under Article 160 have not yet been acquitted. As of today, these people should be acquitted, I consider them innocent!” says Akhmed Kayumov. – says Akhmed Kayumov.
Polat Ohunov, an opposition politician from Uzbekistan, chairman of the Central Asian Association registered in Sweden, and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Uzbekistan, believes that the days of Islam Karimov are over and it is now worth bringing justice back to those people who have been victimized in this matter.
In his opinion, everything needs to be reconsidered in the light of new good-neighborly relations. And to solve this issue, a political campaign is needed to draw the attention of presidents and parliaments, he said.
“If the specialized committee of the parliament together with the prosecutor’s office decide that a new approach is needed in dealing with these cases, then there will be grounds for reconsidering the cases. The Tajik government should also contact Uzbekistan on this issue,” Polat Ohunov said.
CABAR.asia asked the State Statistics Committee to clarify the number of people serving sentences under Article 160 of the Criminal Code in Uzbekistan. The list of those detained on these charges was concealed until 2019, it said. Since 2020, this information has been made public. In 2020, one case was initiated. In 2021 and in 2022, one criminal case was initiated under these articles. There is no information about which citizens of which countries were held in these cases.
What are the governments of both countries doing to address the problem?
The Tajik authorities state that they are constantly monitoring the fate of the country’s citizens imprisoned in Uzbekistan and are assisting in their release.
Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry responded to a request from the Asia-Plus news agency that 78 Tajik citizens are currently imprisoned in Uzbekistan. According to the agency, five of them were imprisoned on charges of espionage, the rest – on charges of smuggling, illegal border crossing and drug trafficking.
The Foreign Ministry’s response states that they sent memos to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry 17 times during the 2020-2023 period “to facilitate the fair consideration of cases.” Their efforts have paid off. During 2021-2022, nine Tajik nationals imprisoned in Uzbekistan on espionage charges were “exonerated.” No further details about these people or their cases were provided.
In 2018, citing its source in the Tajik authorities, Radio Ozodi reported that five Tajik citizens accused of espionage had been released from Uzbek prisons on the basis of an amnesty law.
Our correspondent tried to get an answer to the question about the number of convicts serving sentences under Article 160 in Uzbekistan’s colonies from the country’s state authorities, but was denied an answer.
We sent a request to the Supreme Court of the Republic of Uzbekistan with the same question. So far we have not received an answer. But in case of their positive response, we will definitely inform our readers about it.
A lawyer from Tajikistan, Bakhtiyor Nasrulloyev, also says that, according to his information, several residents of Sughd region who were imprisoned in Uzbekistan were released from prison after the death of Islam Karimov.
He said the cases of Tajik nationals remaining in Uzbek prisons can be reviewed only through negotiations between the official authorities in Dushanbe and Tashkent.
“Only the governments of the two countries can negotiate on this issue within the framework of international documents. In particular, within the framework of the Minsk Convention “On legal assistance and legal relations in civil, family and criminal cases” and other international documents. Only through negotiations. For example, Tajikistan can offer to transfer citizens imprisoned in Uzbekistan to Tajikistan to continue serving their sentences or offer to apply the law on amnesty to them in Uzbekistan,” Bakhtiyor Nasrulloyev added.
It should be noted that several Uzbek citizens are also imprisoned in Tajikistan. According to the Supreme Court of Tajikistan, as of August 14, 2023, five citizens of Uzbekistan are serving sentences in correctional institutions in Tajikistan. They have been convicted of such crimes as intentional infliction of serious harm to health, illegal trafficking of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances, violation of traffic rules and use of vehicles, as well as illegal crossing of the state border of Tajikistan.
We have not been able to find out whether there are people in prisons in Tajikistan accused of spying for Uzbekistan.
I do not want to die in prison
Imprisoned citizens of Tajikistan, charged under Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan and serving their sentences in the colonies of Uzbekistan, appeal to the Presidents of both countries to review their cases, conduct a fair investigation and acquit them.
All the prisoners we interviewed, their relatives and lawyers are asking for a review of their cases.
“We are not spies. We were imprisoned by the NSS to get medals and insignia. All those who led the investigation are imprisoned. I have been sitting for 7 years. I have 7 more years left in prison. Mr. President, give us practical help to exonerate ourselves. We weren’t spying. We’re all ordinary people – one of us is a farmer, one of us is a merchant, and one of us is an ordinary employee of the company. No secret information was known to us. How could we pass a secret unknown to us to another nation? We are not spies. – says Zainiddin Alimov.
“I ask the President of Uzbekistan to release us. All the investigators who were leading the cases against us have been jailed. We would like to be released,” says Zafar Rakhmatov.