Dushanbe, August 31: Tajikistan’s Supreme Court has handed down long prison terms to four men found guilty of terrorism, in the ex-Soviet state’s first trial of al Qaeda members, its security service said on Monday.
Tajikistan, an impoverished mountainous nation, counts on investment from former imperial master Russia, but has also been courted by Washington as a key transit route for U.S. troops fighting the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
It secured the extradition of the four Tajik nationals from Afghanistan.
“The investigation established that … (these four) went to Afghanistan in the early 1990s and took an active part in war actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan on al Qaeda’s side,” the Tajik State Committee on National Security said in a statement.
The court sentenced two of them to 15 years in a high-security prison and the others to eight years each.
—-Agencies