CRITICS of Emomali Rahmon, Tajikistan’s president, tend to live in fear, accustomed to receiving death threats or being locked up on spurious charges. Still, a leading detractor's assassination, on March 5th in Istanbul, sent chills through the country’s beleaguered opposition. Events in recent weeks seem to confirm that Tajikistan’s dictator has decisively turned his back on the country's fragile post-civil-war order.

The Tajik opposition figure, Umarali Kuvatov (pictured), fled the country in 2012 after falling out with the ruling family, reportedly over a business deal with the president’s son-in-law. The tycoon turned to Facebook to declare war on Mr Rahmon’s kleptocracy, launching biting broadsides but never mounting a serious challenge. Nonetheless, Mr Rahmon pursued Mr Kuvatov’s extradition obsessively—first in Dubai, where he was held for nine months on a Tajik warrant, and more recently in Turkey, where Mr Kuvatov had applied for asylum.

Last week, while dining with a Tajik acquaintance in Istanbul, Mr Kuvatov and his family suddenly fell ill, possibly from poisoning, according to Turkish media reports. When they stepped outside to seek medical help, Mr Kuvatov was shot once in the back of the head. The assassin vanished.

His murder came just days after parliamentary elections in Tajikistan, held on March 1st, that the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said failed to meet basic democratic standards. OSCE monitors said that half of the counts they observed should have been thrown out, and reported ballot-box stuffing and intimidation. State media, they said, had heavily favoured the president’s party.

Tajikistan has never held an election judged fair by independent observers, but in past votes the opposition was allowed to take a few seats—not enough to make any legislative difference, but a way of easing the conflicts which, in the 1990s, erupted into a civil war pitting a jumble of opposition parties against former Communist bosses led by Mr Rahmon. A peace agreement signed in 1997 guaranteed the opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), 30% of government positions and participation in politics. Over the years Mr Rahmon has steadily reneged on that deal; this month, the IRPT (long deprived of government posts) was shut out of the national legislature for the first time.

Some fear that the lack of space for a legitimate opposition will force critics to adopt more drastic, and possibly violent, tactics. The IRPT appears to have widespread support, especially among the angry, jobless young men seeking work in Russia. They fumed at the president’s decision to appoint his son as the head of the country’s notoriously corrupt customs service while ignoring widespread unemployment.

Last October Mr Kuvatov called, via Facebook, for an anti-regime protest in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. The president swiftly mobilised armoured vehicles, blocked websites and declared Mr Kuvatov’s movement, called Group 24, “extremist” (using, as he often does, the threat of Islamic radicalism to justify a crackdown). His murder came two days after a Tajik court sentenced another member of his movement to 17 years in prison on charges of extremism and insulting the president.

The leader of the IRPT compared the assassination of Mr Kuvatov with that of Russia’s former deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, in Moscow the week before. In reality, Mr Kuvatov had limited influence and did not enchant all Tajik democracy advocates. But in being silenced, he joins numerous other critics of Mr Rahmon. In 2013 a former minister, Zayd Saidov, was arrested shortly after forming a political party. After a closed trial in one of Mr Rahmon’s obedient courts, he was found guilty of fraud, corruption, rape and polygamy and locked up for 26 years. Soon afterwards his lawyer—who often defended the president’s critics—was jailed for nine years.