Drug Plantings Still Silence Critics in Uzbekistan

If you’re an activist in Uzbekistan, better watch your pockets! You never know what might end up in them. 

Using one of the oldest tricks in its dirty book, Tashkent has planted drugs on an Uzbek businessman and public defense lawyer, he says. 

 

Authorities detained Habibulla “Oybek” Ilmuratov in Tashkent Region’s Yangiyol District on June 23. Even though he does not consider himself a human rights activist and is not a member of any rights organisation, he has helped hundreds of people win cases in criminal, civil, economic and administrative courts in the past 12 years, offering legal advice to up to 10 people a day, according to a report by the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan.

 

In a complaint to Prosecutor-General Rashid Kadyrov, Ombudswoman Sayyora Rashidova, and others, Ilmuratov said that hours before his arrest Yangiyol’s former deputy prosecutor, Farrukh Bakiyev, and a senior police officer, Ikhtiyar Khasanov, had threatened him. They said he would be brought up on drug-related charges, so that “I will never come out of prison.”

Then they found heroin in his cellar.

“I believe this drug was planted by staff of the town interior department themselves,” Ilmuratov said. “There are no fingerprints of mine on the plastic packet because when staff of the Yangiyol town interior department tried to slip this packet into my hands, I did not take it,” he explained in the complaint.

The suspect’s son, Vladislav Ilmuratov, 27, confirmed Ilmuratov’s claims to EurasiaNet.org.

“He was told beforehand that they wanted to plant drugs on him,” the younger Ilmuratiov said. 

“They found this packet but there are not my father’s fingerprints on it. … They should suspect everyone living in the house: they are not checking anyone but are saying [to my father] ‘This is yours,’” Vladislav explained.

Tashkent regularly plants drugs on civil society activists, journalists and human rights activists it wishes to silence, the US government has documented in the past. Convictions are easy in drug cases, observers explain.

In a high-profile case, journalist Salidjon Abdurakhmanov, Uznews.net’s contributor in Karakalpakstan, was detained in June 2008 and sentenced to ten years in prison for intention to sell drugs that traffic police officers had “found” in his car.

Like Ilmuratov, Abdurakhmanov also accused police of planting the drugs. He backed his claim by noting that investigators had showed no interest in establishing whether his fingerprints were on the packets of marijuana and opium. Moreover, he noted, the initial charges of drug consumption were changed to “intent to sell” when no traces of the drugs appeared in his blood.