Activist Polat Shamshetov, who on January 31 was handed a prison term along with 21 other people for taking part in unprecedented anti-government protests in Uzbekistan's Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan last year, has died in custody.
Uzbekistan's Prosecutor-General’s Office said on February 6 that Shamshetov, 45, had died two days earlier of a "thromboembolism of the pulmonary artery and acute heart failure."
Self-exiled Karakalpak activists said over the weekend that Shamshetov might have been tortured to death in custody and demanded a thorough investigation of Shamshetov's death.
Shamshetov was the chief of Karakalpakstan’s Interior Ministry’s detective unit before his arrest in early July last year. He was a son of the late first and only president of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Dauletbai Shamshetov, who led the autonomous republic in 1991-1992 before Tashkent canceled the post.
Polat Shamshetov was among Karakalpak activists who were handed prison terms in Uzbekistan's southwestern city of Bukhara on January 31 for their roles in the protests in Karakalpakstan in July. He was found guilty of inciting mass unrest and taking part in them and handed a six-year prison term.
Lawyer and journalist Dauletmurat Tajimuratov received the longest prison term in the case -- 16 years, on a charge of plotting to seize power by disrupting the constitutional order, organizing mass unrest, embezzlement, and money laundering.
SEE ALSO: In Uzbekistan's Karakalpakstan, Trial Over Deadly Unrest Makes A 'Hero' Of Its Intended VillainFour defendants, including another journalist, Lolagul Qallykhanova, were handed parole-like sentences and immediately released from custody.
Other defendants were sentenced to prison terms of between three and 8 1/2 years. It remains unclear how the defendants pleaded.
Uzbek authorities say 21 people died in Karakalpakstan during the protests, which were sparked by the announcement in early July last year of a planned change to the constitution that would have undermined the region's right to self-determination.
The violence in Nukus, the main city in Karakalpakstan, forced President Shavkat Mirziyoev to make a rare about-face and scrap the proposal.
Mirziyoev accused "foreign forces" of being behind the unrest, without further explanation, before backing away from the proposed changes.
The trial started in late November in Bukhara, around 600 kilometers from both Nukus and the capital, Tashkent.
Mirziyoev came to power in 2016 after the death of his autocratic predecessor, Islam Karimov.
Karakalpaks are a Central Asian Turkic-speaking people. Their region used to be an autonomous area within Kazakhstan before becoming autonomous within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1930 and then part of Uzbekistan in 1936.
Karakalpakstan is home to fewer than two million people, out of a nation of 35 million, but it covers more than one-third of Uzbekistan's territory.
The European Union has called for an independent investigation into the violence.