A court in Russia in early August sentenced Madina Bondarenko, the Ossetian wife of a notorious recruiter for the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Tajikistan, to 11 years in prison on a charge of being a member of a terrorist group, one of her relatives told RFE/RL on September 3.
Bondarenko, who was accused by Russia of cooperating with and belonging to IS, was extradited from Tajikistan in May 2023.
She is the wife of Parviz Saidrahmonov (aka Abu Dovud), who was sentenced to 21 years in prison in November on terrorism charges in Dushanbe.
Bondarenko's relative said she rejected the charge, saying that her husband tricked her when he brought her to Syria via Turkey several years ago as she was unaware that their final destination would be Syria. However, the court took into account Saidrahmonov's testimony to Russian investigators in which he said his wife went to Syria voluntarily, knowing that the couple planned to join IS there.
The couple and their children were extradited to Tajikistan from Turkey in 2022.
Saidrahmonov was accused of recruiting more than 200 people to fight in Syria and Iraq and was alleged to be behind multiple terrorist activities in Tajikistan, Russia, and Sweden.
He was sentenced on charges of organizing a terrorist group, extremism, and recruiting mercenaries to fight in a foreign country. Saidrahmonov was a migrant worker in Russia when he left in 2014 for Iraq and Syria, where he joined the ranks of IS.
Swedish investigators say Saidrahmonov was an accomplice of Rakhmat Akilov, an Uzbek man who was convicted of murder and terrorism for driving a hijacked truck down a busy pedestrian street in Stockholm on April 7, 2017, killing five people and injuring 14 others.
Akilov, a rejected asylum seeker in Sweden before the attack who was in contact with alleged IS militants from Tajikistan, was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018.
Saidrahmonov was later captured by Syrian authorities and in mid-2020 disappeared from a prison in the Syrian town of Afrin when Tajikistan was working on his extradition to Dushanbe.
Tajik authorities, who took Saidrahmonov into custody in September 2022, consider him to be "one of the most dangerous recruiters of Islamic State."
Dushanbe estimates that about 2,000 Tajik citizens joined IS in Iraq and Syria in 2013-15. Hundreds of them were killed in clashes in the Middle East. Some of those who returned to Tajikistan were either sentenced to lengthy prison terms or received amnesty.