The gang affiliates to the Jama'at (league) of Central Asian Mojaheddin. Militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan established the league after they joined the notorious Al-Qaida.
As far as the Committee knows, the gang was involved in preparation and perpetration of a series of terror acts in Uzbekistan, late last March into early April, and July 30.
Kazakh secret services thwarted assassinations of Uzbekistan's top officials. Gang chieftains, who are in hiding outside the post-Soviet area, had scheduled the terror acts for this year, said Mr. Bozhko.
The four Uzbek nationals will be extradited to their home country as the investigation is over, said Kozy-Korpesh Karbuzov, deputy chief of Kazakhstan's National Security Committee.
There are presently about two thousand extremists in Uzbek prisons, say the Prosecutor General's officers. Human Rights Watch statistics are quite different-seven thousand. The figure bases on studies that lasted five years and involved many parts of Uzbekistan.
Anti-terror efforts are on in the neighbouring Tajikistan, too. The Sogd regional court, in the country's north, convicted twenty Hazb al-Tahrir militants for instigating interethnic strife and propaganda of overthrowing the constitutional regime by violence. Their prison terms vary from three to eight years.
The men were detained, February 9, in a restaurant in the heart of Hujand, Sogd regional centre. As the regional prosecutor's men and national secret service agents seized the militants, they found on the men a huge stock of propaganda printed matter that called to establish a caliphate, Muslim theocracy, throughout Central Asia.
The Hazb al-Tahrir, or Islamic Liberation Party, is an underground organisation that started in the Middle East. It took root in Central Asia following the USSR collapse. The party has been actively circulating leaflets and making other propaganda since the mid-1990s. Spearheaded mainly against Uzbekistan, the Hazb is active in other Central Asian countries, as well.
The first Tajik branches of the Hazb appeared in the country's north late in 1998. Tajikistan's Supreme Court outlawed the party, April 2001. Dynamic activities are on, however, in the entire country now. More than eighty Hazb al-Tahrir militants have been arrested in Tajikistan since the year's start.
