A Tajik court has jailed five members of the Tablighi Jamaat for anti-government propaganda, continuing a series of tough measures against religious movements not endorsed by Central Asian governments. Increased fighting in nearby Afghanistan has prompted talks of militants trickling into Central Asia, although local opposition movements say their governments use the Islamist threat as an excuse to crack down on dissent. Mostly Muslim ex-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have in the last few months reported a string of clashes with what they described as militants linked to nearby Afghanistan's Taliban.
This month, Kyrgyzstan detained six members of Hizb ut-Tahrir for distributing radical propaganda.
Those sentenced in Tajikistan on Monday had faced similar charges of "publicly calling for overthrowing the constitutional order". "The convicts are activists of the Tablighi Jamaat organisation and have been trained in special religious centres and schools of Indonesia, Pakistan and United Arab Emirates," the court said in a statement. Tablighi Jamaat, a group founded in India in 1926, keeps a low public profile and says it does not get involved in politics. But the Tajik government regards it as extremist.