The Supreme Court has kept silence although a month has passed since the case of murder of the first deputy head of Orienbonk, Shuhrat Ismatulloyev, has moved to it.
Meanwhile, an official source within the Supreme Court told Asia-Plus in an interview today morning that the banker’s murder case has been designated “top secret”. Therefore, information about the judge presiding over the trial and the date of start of the trial is not subject to disclosure.
As it had been reported earlier, in a written response to the request of Asia-Plus, the Prosecutor-General’s Office said on November 24 that “after a full and objective investigation, criminal proceedings have been instituted against 14 people, including Dilshod Saidmurodov, and the case moved to the Supreme Court on November 18.”
No other details of the investigation into this case have yet been obtained.
Later the Supreme Court itself confirmed this information.
However, a month later, the start date of the hearing in the case is unknown. Although according to the country’s legislation, deadline for the commencement of consideration of a criminal case in a court is set for the period from 14 to 30 days (Article 271 of Tajikistan’s Criminal Procedure Code).
Recall, the suspected organizer of kidnapping and killing of Shuhrat Ismatulloyev, Dilshod Saidmurodov, who is better known as “Dilshod S.B.” was detained in Russia and extradited to Tajikistan in early July.
Tajik authorities have said that Dilshod Saidmurodov was the leader of the criminal group that abducted and killed Shuhrat Ismatulloyev.
After committing the crime he reportedly fled to the Russian Federation.
Saidmurodov previously worked in law enforcement agencies. His employment records include working for the Interior Ministry’s Organized Crime Control Directorate and a stint with the Anti-Cybercrime Unit within the General-Prosecutor’s Office. According to some sources, Saidmurodov had also worked for the state anticorruption agency but had been unemployed in recent years.
Shuhrat Ismatulloyev, 49, the first deputy director of Orienbonk, which is one of the largest financial institutions in Tajikistan, went missing in the evening of June 23 near his home in Dushanbe.
Tajik authorities said the banker was forced by four men into a car with tinted windows and driven away at around 8 p.m. local time.
The Interior Ministry offered a US$30,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the kidnappers.
Two weeks later, the Tajik Prosecutor-General’s Office claimed Ismatulloyev had been killed by his abductors several hours after he was kidnapped.
It said in a July 7 statement that Ismatulloyev was taken to a house in the village of Shodob, outside Dushanbe, where he was beaten, tortured, and subsequently killed by his kidnappers. The banker’s body and the car were thrown into the Zarafshon River, it added.
The crime was allegedly plotted by a 40-year-old Dilshod Saidmurodov, who set up a 10-man “armed criminal group” to carry it out.
The banker’s body was found in the Zarafshon River almost two months later.
Руcский