DUSHANBE -- A notorious Islamic State recruiter from Tajikistan, Parviz Saidrahmonov (aka Abu Dovud), was sentenced to 21 years in prison in November on terrorism charges in Dushanbe, Tajik Supreme Court officials said on February 16.
According to the officials, the 35-year-old Saidrahmonov was extradited from Turkey in September and sentenced on November 11 on charges of organizing a terrorist group, extremism, and recruiting mercenaries to fight in a foreign country.
There were no official reports about Saidrahmonov's trial or an explanation for why the Supreme Court announced the sentencing three months after it was handed down. Some media reports cited sources as saying that prosecutors had sought life in prison for him.
Saidrahmonov, who was also suspected of having links to terrorist attacks in Sweden, Russia, and Tajikistan, was a migrant worker in Russia when he left in 2014 for Iraq, where he joined the ranks of the Islamic State terrorist organization.
He 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.
Turkish authorities said later they had Saidrahmonov in their custody.
Tajik authorities have considered the man "one of the most dangerous recruiters to the Islamic State," saying he managed to recruit more than 200 people to the terrorist organization.
Swedish investigators say Saidrahmonov was an accomplice of Rakhmat Akilov, an Uzbek man who drove a hijacked truck down a busy pedestrian street in Stockholm on April 7, 2017, killing five people and injuring 10 others.
Akilov, a rejected asylum seeker in Sweden before the attack, was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018.
Tajik authorities have said that about 2,000 citizens of the Central Asian nation joined the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2013-2015. Hundreds of them were killed in the clashes in the Middle East. Some of those who returned to Tajikistan were either sentenced to lengthy prison terms or received amnesty.