More than 150 Tajik migrants workers have been detained by Moscow police, several of the laborers told RFE/RL, saying they were being held in the courtyard of a police station.
The men said they were woken up by police in the early morning on May 30 before being taken “in four buses” to the Mitino district police headquarters. Police gave no reason for their arrest, the men said.
“We are now at the police station...The officers didn’t tell us why we’re taken here,” a Tajik worker told RFE/RL by phone on condition of anonymity.
Contacted by RFE/RL, Tajikistan’s embassy in Moscow confirmed it is aware of the incident and trying to clarify the situation.
There have been no immediate public comments or statements from either Russian police or Tajik officials.
The workers said they temporarily live in converted railway cars near the construction site where they work in the Mitino district.
There have been several reports of Tajik immigrants being rounded up or beaten in recent days by police in Russia, a top destination for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Tajikistan.
Dozens of Tajik men were rounded up by police in two separate arrests in Moscow’s Mozhaysky district and the town of Kotelniki in Moscow Province last week.
Russian media reported that in at least one incident police had responded to calls from local residents. The residents allegedly complained that a group of Tajik men forced local school children to leave a neighborhood stadium so they could play soccer there themselves.
On May 24, Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to Dushanbe, Semyon Grigoryev, over reports that some 100 Tajik students were detained and beaten by police in Russia's Far Eastern city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
According to the students, they were severely beaten by security officers who raided a dormitory housing Tajik students on May 19.