DUSHANBE, July 23, 2012, Asia-Plus -- Major-General Abdullo Nazarov, chief of the State Committee for National Security (SCNS)’s office in Gorno Badakhshan, has been stabbed to death while in the Ishkashim district.

The incident took place on the afternoon of July 21.

“A group of unknown persons stopped his car, when he was retuning from business trip to the Ishkashim district,” said Nozirjon Bouriyev, a spokesman for SCNS.  “They took General Nazarov out of car and stabbed him several times.”

According to one of versions, persons involved in tobacco smuggling in the region, killed Nazarov, the SCNS spokesman added.  He refrained from giving further details of the incident.

Criminal proceedings have been instituted and a special group has been set up to investigate the murder.

Meanwhile, Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service reports that according to some source, Nazarov was accompanied by two officers from "Alpha Group," a special unit of the SCNS, when he was killed.  The whereabouts of those officers was not immediately clear early on July 21.

According to Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service, Nazarov had been a KGB agent during Soviet era.  But in 1991, he publicly accused the KGB of killing protesters in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe during several days of demonstrations there in February 1990.  He was fired from the KGB after making those accusations.

In 1992, Nazarov joined the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) that was opposed to Tajikistan''s Soviet-era rulers.  From 1992 to 1997, as civil was raged in Tajikistan, Nazarov remained outside of the country. He never confirmed his whereabouts during those years.

After the signing in Moscow of a General Peace Agreement between the Tajik government and the United Tajik Opposition, Nazarov returned to Tajikistan''s security service under a deal in the accord which allowed 30 percent of government posts to be named by Tajikistan''s opposition.

He served as chief of SCNS’s office in the northern province of Sughd and as a deputy of the chairman of the SCNS.  In 2010, Nazarov was appointed to head SCNS’s office in the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (Gorno Badakhshan of GBAO).  

Within months of that appointment, during the summer of 2010, authorities in Kyrgyzstan accused Nazarov of offering a safe haven to the relatives of former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in Gorno Badakhshan.  Abdullo Nazarov categorically denied those accusations.