Tajikistan on alert after nightclub blast wounds five

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Authorities in Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan, are worried about what they see as the growing threat of radicalism after a rise in clashes between security forces and armed gangs.

On Friday, suicide car bombers killed two police officers and wounded 25 at a police station in Tajikistan's second city, Khujand, the country's first known suicide bombing in five years.

SECURITY TIGHTENED

The National Committee for State Security, Tajikistan's successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said the nightclub explosion was an act of "hooliganism" involving pyrotechnics.

Security had been tightened at Dushanbe's international airport and other key sites, Interior Ministry spokesman Makhmadullo Asadulloyev said.

But he said this was standard procedure ahead of the Independence Day holiday on September 9 and the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

A local business owner said he feared further attacks.

"The country is moving more and more towards Islamisation. It's difficult for those who are more inclined towards the secular way of life, and not the religious," said the man, who owns a cafe in Dushanbe and asked not to be identified.

He said he was approached by a group of young men at the beginning of Ramadan, who advised him to close his cafe during daylight hours and to refrain from selling alcohol.

"I refused, because I rent the premises for the cafe, people work for me, and I cannot reduce these expenses for Ramadan," he said. "I'm very afraid of payback from these people."

CLAMPING DOWN

Tajik authorities frequently arrest and jail members of Muslim movements not endorsed by the government, describing them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government. More than 100 members of banned organisations have been jailed this year.

Critics of President Imomali Rakhmon, who has led Tajikistan since 1992, accuse him of using the Islamist threat as an excuse to crack down on dissent in the nation of 7 million, the poorest in ex-Soviet Central Asia. Other governments in the region are also clamping down on alleged religious extremism.

In recent weeks, Rakhmon has criticised a growing fashion among women for Islamic dress and called on parents to withdraw their children from religious schools abroad, saying students could become "terrorists".

Rakhmon last week fired all bar one of his senior security service officials after 25 Islamist militants broke out of prison on August 23, killing five guards in a gun battle.

One of the fugitives, Ibrahim Nasriddinov, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, was arrested last week. [ID:nLDE68110W] The security sources said on Monday that a second had also been recaptured.

The escaped prisoners were among 46 people to whom Tajikistan's Supreme Court in August handed down long jail terms on accusations they had planned to overthrow the authorities.

They included four Afghan citizens and six Russians from the Caucasus republics of Dagestan and Chechnya. All were arrested in July 2009. The other 23 fugitives remain on the loose.