DUSHANBE (Reuters) – A court in Tajikistan has handed down prison sentences of between eight and 20 years to more than 30 people it convicted of trying to poison attendees of a festival last year, the prosecutor general’s office said on Friday.
A source in the Tajik security services told Reuters the convicted people were all tied to Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the Afghan offshoot of Islamic State.
Islamic State, the militant group that once sought control over swathes of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for a mass shooting at a concert hall near Moscow last year which left 145 people dead.
Tajik prosecutors said the defendants had attempted to poison food served to attendees of a Nowruz, or New Year, festival last March in Vahdat, a small city east of the capital Dushanbe.
Ten more people are wanted for the crime, the head of the department for combating terrorism and extremism in the attorney general’s office, Jumanazar Sayidakhmadzoda, told reporters. He did not say exactly how many people had been sentenced.
Tajikistan is a landlocked country of some 10 million people sandwiched between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China. The majority of Tajiks are adherents of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam.
Three militant attacks were carried out in the country in 2024 and two attacks were thwarted, the interior minister said this week.
Earlier this month, nine prisoners who had been convicted over links to Islamic State and the Jihadi Salafi movement assaulted guards at a prison in Vahdat in an escape attempt, leaving five inmates dead.
(This story has been corrected to say interior minister, instead of foreign minister, in paragraph 7)
(Reporting by Nazarali Pirnazarov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
