Mother of 'boiled' man jailed

2004-02-12 13:36

Tashkent - A woman whose son was allegedly boiled to death in a prison in Uzbekistan was jailed for six years on Thursday on charges of religious extremism and plotting against the state, in a ruling critics slammed as a political witchhunt.

The verdict against Fatima Mukhadirova, 62, was "unjust and slanderous," one of her sons, Mirzahaim Avazov, said outside the district court in Uzbekistan's capital.

"The law is used only to protect this country's despotic regime, not to protect the people," he told reporters.

This former Soviet republic's secular authorities launched the case against Mukhadirova after allegedly finding at her home leaflets published by Hizbut Tahrir, a non-violent Islamic radical organisation that has attracted grass-roots support in this Central Asian country.

Since the Soviet Union's collapse the government of President Islam Karimov has attempted to crush even moderate Islamic belief among Uzbekistan's mostly Muslim population, fearing destabilisation from neighbouring Afghanistan.

During the trial Mukhadirova argued that the case was part of a witchhunt that the authorities launched against her family because she sought redress from Uzbek and Western institutions for the death of her son, Muzafar Avazov, who died at a notorious desert prison camp housing political prisoners in 2002.

Trying to protect her children

"She's been convicted because she tried to protect her children - she was trying to stop what happened to Muzafar from happening again," said Lazokat Avazova, whose husband, another son of Mukhadirova's, is serving a jail sentence also for religious extremism and threatening the state.

The fate of Avazov and fellow prisoner Husnidin Alimov, allegedly also boiled to death, attracted international attention last year when Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, stepped in.

Murray commissioned a report by a Western forensic expert, who found that photographs of the two men's corpses appeared to support the claim that they had been beaten and then boiled to death while at the Jaslyk prison camp.

The British Foreign Office investigated the ambassador's activities after he criticised the human rights abuses by his host country.

- AFP