OSH, Kyrgyzstan -- Police in Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city, have detained a former leader of the city's Uzbek culture center, Karamat Abdullaeva, who was sentenced in absentia to 16 years in prison for her alleged role in deadly ethnic clashes more than a decade ago.
Police in the southern city of Osh said on April 24 that Abdullaeva was detained two days earlier and immediately placed in a detention center.
The clashes between Kyrgyz and local Uzbeks started on June 10, 2010, in Kyrgyzstan’s southern regions of Osh and Jalal-Abad and lasted for several days. At least 446 people were killed, while thousands were injured or displaced as a result of the violence. Dozens more went missing. The majority of victims were ethnic Uzbeks.
After the deadly clashes, the Kyrgyz Interior Ministry added more than 100 persons to its wanted list, including 37 individuals for whom courts issued international arrest warrants.
The leader of the large Uzbek community in Kyrgyzstan’s south, Kadyrjan Batyrov, who fled the country, was sentenced in absentia to life in prison on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and organizing the 2010 ethnic clashes.
Batyrov, who received political asylum in Sweden in 2011, died at the age of 62 in Ukraine in December.
He maintained his innocence, declaring the trial against him was political retaliation by the Kyrgyz government.
After President Sadyr Japarov officially assumed the office in January 2021, he ordered a reinvestigation of the materials of the 2010 ethnic clashes.
Shortly after that, Kyrgyzstan's State Committee of National Security reopened the probe into Batyrov's escape from the country, also in 2010.
In September 2016, Batyrov addressed an OSCE conference in Warsaw where he criticized efforts by Kyrgyzstan's government to investigate his escape from Kyrgyzstan.