THERE are fears for the safety of dozens of opposition activists in Uzbekistan following the murder of a journalist whose exposure of human rights abuses had enraged the regime.

Alisher Saipov, a 26-year-old ethnic Uzbek, was gunned down outside his office in Osh, a town in southern Kyrgyzstan on the Uzbekistan border. His murder has sent shockwaves through Uzbekistan’s beleaguered opposition.

Saipov had just left his office after working late on Wednesday and was speaking on his mobile phone when a man stepped out of the shadows and shot him in the leg. The hitman fired two more bullets into Saipov’s head before fleeing.

For weeks Saipov had told friends that he feared he was being trailed by Uzbek security services and a day before his killing he had been visited by three unidentified men.

After his murder, officers from Kyrgyz security services seized computers, phones and documents from his office containing details of opposition figures and their efforts to topple the regime of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s president.

There are fears that the Kyrgyz security services will pass on those details to their Uzbek counterparts, exposing dozens of opposition activists and their sympathisers in Uzbekistan. Human rights groups say they could face arrest and torture at the hands of a regime that has an appalling human rights record.

Shahida Tulaganova, an Uzbek journalist and close friend of Saipov, was due to meet him on the day he was killed. She has no doubt who was behind the murder.

“All his life he was fighting against this [Uzbek] regime. No one else was interested in killing him,” she said. Tulaganova was worried about the seized documents falling into the wrong hands. “The people in the local security services are corrupt and some of them are on the payroll of the Uzbek KGB. All the details about the network of opposition people in Uzbekistan were in his office. Now all those people could be compromised.”

It was Saipov’s reporting of the aftermath of the Andijan crackdown, when hundreds of protesters were shot dead by troops in May 2005, that provoked the fury of the Tashkent regime.

Saipov was the first to reveal how Uzbek agents had crossed into Kyrgyzstan to kidnap refugees fleeing the massacre. This month the European Union eased sanctions imposed on Uzbekistan in the wake of the Andijan killings.

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