MOSCOW, 10 June 2003 — Russia’s FSB security services arrested 121 members of the Hizb-e-Tahrir party in Moscow, dismantling the cell of a group that aims to set up a Muslim state in Central Asia, the FSB said yesterday.
NTV television aired footage of the Friday raid, showing dozens of young men lined up against a brick wall as armed soldiers in camouflage stood guard.
“These are terrorists who want to overthrow the existing regime by military means,” the FSB’s top spokesman, Sergei Ignatchenko, told the channel.
Russia put Hizb-e-Tahrir, a radical group operating out of Ferghana Valley — which straddles Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — on its blacklist of 15 terrorist organizations in February.
An FSB spokesman initially told AFP that 55 suspected members — foreigners living illegally in Russia — were arrested in the raid, but RIA Novosti quoted Ignatchenko as saying a total of 121 had been arrested.
“They were hiding on the grounds of a Moscow factory, where they were arrested,” Ignatchenko said, without providing details on the other 66 arrests.
An FSB spokesman told AFP that the cell’s leader, Kyrgyz national Alisher Musayev, was detained in the raid, during which agents found 100 grams of explosives, three grenades and 15 Hizb-e-Tahrir leaflets.
Agents also captured an active Tajik member of Hizb-e-Tahrir named Akram Dzhalolov, seizing 400 grams of explosives, two detonators, 38 extremist tracts and two pamphlets about the party, he said.
Russia has repeatedly said it is targeted by international terror groupings and has accused the Al-Qaeda network of aiding rebels in its breakaway southern republic of Chechnya.
The Hizb-e-Tahrir was founded in the 1950s in the Middle East but spread into Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The most active clandestine group in Central Asia, it counts thousands of members in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
It had close ties with Afghanistan’s hard-line Taleban regime, which was toppled by US-led forces in November 2001.
