BISHKEK -- Kyrgyz authorities have again closed a case looking into the assassination of independent journalist Alisher Saipov, who was shot dead in the southern city of Osh almost 15 years ago.
A spokesman for the Prosecutor-General's Office, Sirojiddin Kamolidinov, told RFE/RL on September 6 that the case was closed again because "it is impossible to find and bring to justice individuals who were involved in the killing."
Kyrgyz authorities reopened the case in August 2019 after a court decreed that it should be revisited.
Saipov, the founder and chief editor of the newspaper Siyosat (Politics), was shot dead in central Osh on October 24, 2007, at the age of 26. He was also a contributor to RFE/RL and Voice of America.
Saipov's Uzbek-language weekly, which was distributed both in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, stopped publishing after the murder.
In 2010, a court in Osh found local resident Abdulgafar Rasulov guilty of killing Saipov and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
However, Saipov's relatives protested against the sentence. They argued that a deeper plot was at the heart of the crime and that the "real killers" and those who planned the murder were not punished.
Saipov, an ethnic Uzbek, wrote about Islamic groups and opposition politics in the region. He had also reported on the 2005 massacre of protesters in the Uzbek city of Andijon.
In 2012, the Kyrgyz Interior Ministry launched a fresh investigation into Saipov's murder, citing "new leads" in the case. However, the new investigation failed to identify any new suspects involved in the killing.
The case was initially closed in 2013.