DUSHANBE, November 30 (RIA Novosti) – Unrest broke out Friday in a remote town in the impoverished former Soviet state of Tajikistan that was rocked by large-scale civil disturbances in 2012, local media have reported.
Asia-Plus news portal reported that security service forces attempted to detain a local resident suspected of narcotics possession, sparking a confrontation with residents in Khorog, a town just on the border with Afghanistan.
When agents with the State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, the successor body to the KGB, attempted to enter a house in the town, the owner demanded to be presented with a warrant, which the officers were unable to produce, Asia-Plus reported.
The homeowner left the premises to go to the local police station, and found the security services officers searching the house on his return, the news portal reported.
“During the search, they purportedly found 40 grams of drugs and arrested his brother,” Asia-Plus reported.
Drug trafficking is rife in the mainly Muslim nation of 7.5 million people, where chronic unemployment drives hundreds of thousands abroad yearly in search of work.
A crowd of people surrounded the house as GKNB officers detained the suspect and later entered the building itself amid rumors the drugs had been planted, Asia-Plus reported.
Local people told the news portal that gunshots were heard from inside the house, although it was unclear if anybody had been shot.
The GKNB detained another two people who had entered the house for negotiations, Asia-Plus said.
The news portal cited sources at the site as saying riot police, SWAT team troops and local law enforcement officials were later deployed at the house.
The incident happened in a neighborhood in Khorog called Khlebzavod, which was a focal point for fighting between local gangs and government forces in July 2012.
At least several dozen people, among them both locals and security forces, were killed in that violence, although the exact figure has never been definitively verified by an independent source.
Fighting in Khorog was sparked by the killing in the area of a high-ranking GKNB official, General Abdullo Nazarov, which prompted government demands for the handover of a number of informal leaders in the town.
Authorities claimed the assault on neighborhoods in which the leaders lived was an effort to apprehend Nazarov's killers and stamp out an illegal tobacco smuggling ring.
Local people have argued, however, that the campaign was a government attempt to bolster central control over the rugged Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous province, of which Khorog is the capital.
Gorno-Badakhshan covers almost half the country, but is sparsely populated, largely by ethnic Pamiri followers of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam.
