Swedish prosecutors have accused the Uzbek government of involvement in the attempted murder of a dissident cleric living in Strömsund, referring to the country as a “gangster state”.

Chief prosecutor Krister Petersson said the evidence suggested president Islam Karimov’s administration was implicated in the shooting of Obidkhon Qori Nazarov, a persistent critic of the regime, in 2012.

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“What we are talking about is an attempted murder, and in my opinion it has its roots in Uzbekistan,” Petersson said in his opening statements at the trial at the Östersund district court this week.

Yury Zhukovsky, a 37-year-old Uzbek citizen, is charged with trying to murder Nazarov by shooting him in the head on the stairs outside his apartment in the remote town of Strömsund. He has denied the charges.

Nazarov suffered brain damage in the shooting and has yet to fully recover his speech.

President Karimov’s regime has imprisoned hundreds of domestic opponents, according to watchdog groups. The reach of Uzbek authorities is said to stretch beyond country’s borders, with state security agents accused of orchestrating kidnappings and targeted killings of exiled opposition figures.

In December 2014 Abdullah Bukhari, a conservative Uzbek cleric who fought against Karimov’s regim, was shot dead in Istanbul. Some believe Uzbekistan was behind that killing.

The case

Before the trial began Petersson said that this might be the first case involving a political assassination attempt on Swedish soil. “I’ve never had any case like this when it’s been so obvious that the killer came from a foreign country and acted on that country’s behalf,” he said. “I haven’t heard of anything like this before.”

In court, Petersson showed video footage said to be of Zhukovsky in a supermarket in Strömsund hours before Nazarov, who served as an imam in the town, was found in a pool of blood. Just three minutes after the shooting, signals from Zhukovsky’s phone showed that he had already left the town. The court heard that a bag found discarded outside the apartment, said to have carried the gun used to shoot Nazarov, contained traces of Zhukovsky’s DNA. Petersson said there were clear signs the crime was politically motivated, showing a 2004 report from Human Rights Watch that described how Nazarov, a prominent cleric in the 1990s, had been described as an “enemy of the state” in Uzbekistan. He had been branded a “wahabi”, a term widely used to mean religious radical, and stripped of his post as imam at a leading Tashkent mosque.

Nazarov fled the country as a political refugee in 2006 after his family started being harassed, and some members imprisoned.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People look at election posters of presidential candidates in Tashkent in March. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

Before the trial, Petersson said he had warned Sweden’s foreign ministry that his evidence would point to the Uzbek government, giving diplomats time to prepare for any possible repercussions. “If I say that the authorities in a foreign country are criminals, it might affect diplomatic relations with that country,” he said. “Under the Swedish constitution, I’m obliged to inform the foreign ministry.”

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The strongest indication of official Uzbek involvement, he said, was the Uzbek police’s cancellation of the Interpol arrest warrant it had issued for Nazarov. “They managed to get Interpol to put out an arrest warrant for this man – which said he was a terrorist who was responsible for an assassination attempt in Uzbekistan where 15 people were killed,” he said. “And then, even though they hadn’t had an arrest, they withdrew the arrest warrant. Seven months later, this man was shot.”

He also pointed out that Zhukovsky’s visas had been issued on the back of three recommendation letters from Tashkent’s Pakhtakor football club. “It’s a big club with strong connections to the ruling party,” he said. “I have asked Uzbek authorities to carry out interviews with the leader of this club, but the Uzbek authorities haven’t done these investigations.” Zhukovsky received a transfer of money while he was in Sweden from a Moscow-based company called Zeromaks, for which he claims to have worked.

Connections

Petersson said that he had not established any clear connection between the Moscow-registered Zeromaks and Zeromax, the Swiss-registered Uzbek conglomerate widely seen as having been for a time controlled by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek president Islam Karimov. Zeromax went bankrupt in 2010, and Karimova is living under house arrest after apparently falling out of favour in late 2013.

The hit man is just a pawn. It was someone else who sent him David Nazarov

Finally, Petersson argued that the refusal of the Uzbek authorities to cooperate with his investigation itself was an indication of complicity. “For three years now, I’ve been trying to communicate with the judicial authorities in Uzbekistan, and the only reply I have gotten is a question on what legal grounds I wanted information on who was behind a bank account,” he said.



Petersson said that, given the refusal of Uzbek authorities to cooperate, the possibility of further prosecutions connected with the assassination attempt were unlikely. “The main thing is that the media writes about this and explains that this is a gangster state. I don’t think there will be any legal repercussions for Uzbekistan,” he said. “I don’t think the international court will take this up.”

Nazarov’s son, David, interviewed by the local Östersunds Posten newspaper, said that he hoped that Sweden would prosecute the Uzbek regime. “The hit man is just a pawn. It was someone else who sent him,” he said. “The Uzbek regime is behind this and I hope that they will be prosecuted.”



He said it had been difficult to see the suspect face-to-face for the first time. “It is not much fun. … There are no words to describe the emotions,” he said.

The trial is expected to last one week.

Richard Orange is a freelance journalist based in Malmö, Sweden

• This article was amended on 27 November 2015 to make it clear the prosecutor did not refer to Uzbekistan as a “gangster state” in court