Around 11 August the news broke on several forums that Hasan Asadov was shot to death in his apartment on 9 August. According to the initial reports, he was either the “head of the Interior Ministry’s Terrorism and Anti-Corruption department” or “worked in the department” (Ferghana.ru and Uzmetronom, respectively).
Today, though, Eurasianet is running a story in its briefs that claims to have found an alternate source that contradicts the basic facts of the earlier story and causes a very different potential pattern to emerge.
An Interior Ministry Official shot dead in Tashkent on August 9 was tasked with keeping religious organizations in line, sources tell EurasiaNet. “His job was to keep tabs on the various religious factions in Tashkent; his murder was ’pay back,’” the source claimed on August 14. Hasan Asadov was shot five times at point blank range in his apartment. Uzbek media reports described him as a manager at the ministry’s anti-terrorism and corruption unit.
The Eurasianet story goes on to explicitly posit a link between this most recent murder, the 31 July attack on Anvarqori Tursunov (see last week’s post here at Registan.net) and the murder of another Tashkent religious official, Abror Abrorov, two weeks earlier.
There’s no way to judge the level of knowledge of Eurasianet’s anonymous source, so it’s clearly too early to say anything objective about the likelihood of a connection here. I found it unusual that Eurasianet says “Uzbek media” misled on the story about where Hasan Asadov actually worked and what he actually did. Ferghana.ru has its own sources and usually can be depended on to question the Uzbek MSM says, but so far they have reported no controversy about Asadov’s job description. This is a story to watch for the next few days to see if any other outlets find sources who confirm Eurasianet’s claims.
Please feel free to add links to any other stories in the comments and I’ll update this post in a couple of days if more information becomes available.
This post was written by...
Noah Tucker – author of 27 posts on Registan.net.
Noah has an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies from Harvard, where he studied under John Schoeberlein and specialized in Central Asian religious issues. He lived in Tashkent from 2002-2005 and returned most recently to Central Asia in 2007. He's lived in Russia as well, and traveled throughout much (but by no means all) of the former Soviet Union. He speaks Russian fluently and reads Uzbek and French, though admittedly not all that often and almost never at the same time. He and his family live at this particular moment near the ocean in a place that's supposed to be warm.