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| | [No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20) |
 | | On December 2, 1997, an officer in the traffic department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was brutally murdered in Namangan, one of the largest cities in the Farghona Valley, which borders the Republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east of the capital, Toshkent. |
 | | Officially, the mass arrests were triggered by the murder by beheading in Namangan on December 2, 1997, of Vaqijon Obaidullaev, a captain in the Namangan Provincial State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate (GAI), a branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and reportedly the relative of an important local figure. |
 | | Two other people in Namangan -- Nobirjon Abdullaev, a former chairman of a collective farm, and his wife -- were reportedly beheaded on December 11, and on December 19 three policemen died in a shoot-out with a criminal suspect. |
| www.hrw.org /reports98/uzbekistan (14244 words) |
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