Asliddin Sharipov, the brother of Tajik opposition activist Shavkat Muhammad, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
The sentence was handed down in March of this year, but information only appeared on July 29; authorities have not provided an official comment.
One of Sharipov’s acquaintances said that he was transferred from the Khujand pre-trial detention center to a prison in Dushanbe. He had been living in Russia since 2016 but was detained at the request of Tajik authorities in September 2022 and extradited to Tajikistan on October 1, 2023. For almost two months there was no information about his whereabouts. It later became known that Sharipov, 37, was being held in one of the isolation centers in Khujand.
The Tajik authorities have not commented on the reasons for Asliddin Sharipov’s detention. Human rights organizations link Sharipov’s arrest and extradition to the activities of his brother Shavkat Muhammad, editor of the television channel “Payom,” which is banned in Tajikistan and run by the Islamic Renaissance Party.
According to human rights activists and Shavkat Muhammad himself, his brother’s arrest is aimed at silencing him and stopping him from criticizing the authorities.
