During the operational event held by officers of the State Security Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in June of this year, the activities of an underground group of jihadists, which included 15 people, were stopped on the territory of the Baysun district, Surkhandarya region.
It turned out that the group’s organizer, during his stay in Russia as a labor migrant, came under the influence of supporters of terrorist organizations and began to back up their destructive ideas, the State Security Service said.
Then, promoting these ideas, he began to attract his compatriots, who arrived from Baysun. Members of the group who were born between 1986 and 2002, during their stay in the Russian Federation as labor migrants from 2016 to 2019, held meetings and listened to audio and video messages from the ideological leaders of extremists “Abu Salokh”, “Abdulloh Zufar” and “Sodik Samarkandiy”.
They also discussed the issue of joining the “Katibatul Tawhid wa Jihad” terrorist organization and sent money to their associates in Syria. At the same time, members of the group continued their illegal activities after returning to Uzbekistan.
During the search conducted at their place of residence, more than 30 mobile phones, 55 flashcards, 54 DVD discs, a computer and a tablet with religious audio and video materials were found, which were seized in a procedural manner to conduct an examination of the data stored in them.
A similar case was revealed in the Jizzakh region. A resident of the city of Jizzakh (born in 1998), while working in Turkey in 2017-2019, fell under the influence of terrorist organizations and promoted their ideas among his entourage.
First, he lured his brother (born in 2000). Relatives actively supported extremist ideas in the Odnoklassniki.ru social network. Then, having created a virtual group in the Telegram messenger, the brothers began to carry out propaganda work among the participants.
They knew that the sermons by “Abu Salokh”, “Abdulloh Zufar”, “Abdulloh Bukhoriy”, “Mahmud Abdulmumin” were included in the list of materials prohibited from import, storage and distribution on the territory of the Republic of Uzbekistan. But, despite this, they distributed them among their close relatives.
The members of this virtual group were 23 young people born between 1983 and 1998 – residents of the Jizzakh city and the Sharaf-Rashidov district. As evidence, more than 250 audio and video materials were seized from them.
At present, investigative actions are ongoing on the facts revealed.
