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Bomb blast wounds 7 in Tajikistan nightclub
[Pak Daily Times] A bomb exploded in a nightclub in Tajikistan's capital Dushanbe overnight, wounding seven people, security sources in the Central Asian republic said on Monday.Two high-ranking sources within the security services said they had jugged two radical Islamists in connection with the kaboom, which followed an attack on Friday by suicide car bombers on a cop shoppe in another part of the country. The National Committee for State Security, Tajikistan's successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said in a statement the kaboom was an act of hooliganism involving pyrotechnics, and was not a terrorist act. Nobody was killed in the blast. Central Asian governments are clamping down on what they see as religious extremism in the predominantly Mohammedan but secular former Soviet region. Police detained two men shortly after the kaboom, which occurred at midnight local time (1900 GMT) in the Dusti nightclub in a suburb of Dushanbe, frequented mainly by locals. "An explosive device was detonated in the nightclub with the aim of spreading fear. Young, religious people were responsible, two of whom have been detained," a source within Tajikistan's security services said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A second source also said young Islamists were to blame. "The device was placed beneath a table in the nightclub. But the kaboom was small and did not have serious consequences in terms of human victims," the second source said. Authorities in Tajikistan, which shares a porous 1,340-km border with Afghanistan, are worried about what they see as the threat of growing radicalism following a rise in clashes between security forces and armed gangs. Tajik authorities frequently arrest and jail members of Mohammedan movements not endorsed by the government, describing them as Islamic fascisti intent on overthrowing the government. More than 100 members of banned organisations have been jailed this year. In Friday's attack, suicide car bombers killed two police officers and maimed 25 at a cop shoppe in Tajikistan's second-largest Khujand city. Preident Imomali Rakhmon has led Tajikistan since 1992 and spent the first five years of his rule fighting a civil war against an alliance of religious and democratic groups. Posted by: Fred 2010-09-07 |
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