| Tajikistan said on Monday it had foiled a plot to carry out terrorist attacks against nightclubs and markets in the Central Asian republic and arrested seven Uzbek citizens over the case. Tajikistan, a Muslim nation bordering Afghanistan, is still recovering from a 1992-97 civil war between guerrillas and a secular government that killed more than 100,000 people. It has been calm since the 1997 peace settlement. Tajikistan’s first deputy interior minister, Sharif Nazarov, told reporters the Uzbeks were members of a militant group calling itself the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), active in the region in the late 1990s. “They admitted to having been plotting a string of acts of terror in (the capital) Dushanbe, particularly night clubs and markets,” he said. |