Akbar Akhmedov, one of the suspects in the kidnapping and murder of the first deputy chairman of the Orienbank, died suddenly in the Dushanbe pre-trial detention center and was secretly buried in his native Khujand.
On September 2, three well-informed sources told Radio Ozodi that on August 30, employees of the Department for Organized Crime Control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Dushanbe handed over the body of Akbar Akhmedov to his parents and warned them not to tell anyone about his death in the pre-trial detention center.
According to them, the body of Akbar Akhmedov was not shown to his relatives, but was taken to the cemetery in Khujand in a wooden coffin and buried there. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Tajikistan reported that Akbar Akhmedov is a member of an organized criminal group of 15 people who, after the kidnapping and murder of banker Shukhrat Ismatulloev, fled to Russia with several accomplices.
Sources said that Akbar Akhmedov was wanted, and in early August, law enforcement agencies detained and took his mother to a pre-trial detention center in order to put pressure on her son. According to one of the interlocutors, “Akbar was forced to return to Dushanbe from Moscow in mid-August and surrender to law enforcement agencies.”
One of the informed sources in law enforcement agencies reported on anonymous terms that Akbar Akhmedov was severely beaten and tortured to death during interrogation. Akbar Akhmedov was 36 years old, he had six children, and worked as an IT specialist.
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Tajikistan, Akbar Akhmedov was a member of an organized criminal group that kidnapped Shukhrat Ismatulloev on June 23 and in one of the villages of the Varzob district, “using physical force, an electric shocker, a car hairdryer and other equipment, tortured him to death”, after which the criminals threw him off body into the Zerafshan River. Two months later, his body was found in the Sarazm area of the city of Panjakent. The kidnapping of a banker close to the family of the President of Tajikistan caused a strong reaction and was widely covered in the media.
In Tajikistan, the use of torture to extract confessions has been an acute problem for many years. According to human rights activists, torture and ill-treatment are used during the detention of suspects in the crime and during the investigation, and among the methods used by the security forces are “beating, intimidation, the use of electric current.”
Source : ozodi
