By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
MOSCOW - A car rigged with explosives rammed into a police station in northern Tajikistan on Friday, wounding at least 25 people in an apparent suicide attack, Tajik police officials said.
Russian news agencies, citing unidentified Tajik government officials, reported that several police officers were missing and were feared dead, though there has been no official confirmation of any fatalities.
The attack occurred at the regional police headquarters of the organized-crime department around 8 a.m. local time in the city of Khujand, a police statement said. The attackers were possibly members of an Islamist militant group, police officials added.
The government has frequently voiced concern about Islamic militancy in Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic in Central Asia that shares a long border with Afghanistan.
The blast comes less than two weeks after at least 25 prisoners with suspected ties to Islamist extremists escaped from a detention center in Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe, killing five prison guards in the process.
Most of the men remain at large, although the authorities announced on Thursday that they had captured the suspected organizer of the prison break, a man identified as Ibrokhim Nasriddinov, who was reportedly extradited to Tajikistan several years ago from the United States detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The recent bloodshed appears to have put the country on edge. President Emomali Rakhmon fired his longtime security chief on Thursday in response to the prison break. The escape was an embarrassment to the government, which had been trumpeting what it said were recent successes in the fight against localized pockets of militancy.
Secular forces currently in power in Tajikistan fought a bloody civil war against a loose coalition of Islamic and nationalist groups in the 1990s. Although Tajikistan has been relatively calm for some time, the government has regularly raised the specter of Islamist extremism, often, government critics say, as an excuse to crack down on opponents of President Rakhmon.
No comments:
Post a Comment