Police, two militants killed in Tajikistan gunfight

DUSHANBE: Two suspected members of an Islamist militant group linked to the Taliban and one police officer were killed during a shootout in ex-Soviet Tajikistan, the interior ministry said on Friday.

The militants, who police said were members of the Taliban-linked group the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), were wanted for having opened fire on police earlier this week during a routine traffic check.

"Two terrorists from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were killed while offering resistance during a shootout on Friday," an interior ministry spokesman told AFP on condition of anonymity. One Tajik special forces officer was killed and another wounded during the gunfight, which police said occurred overnight in a mountainous region about 60 kilometres north of the capital Dushanbe.

Both of the suspected militants were Tajik citizens believed to have trained at terrorist-run camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the spokesman said. The IMU (a militant group founded in 1998 to overthrow the government of Tajikistan's neighbour Uzbekistan, and which later joined the Taliban) is considered a terrorist organisation by the United States.

Many IMU fighters are believed to have moved into Pakistan's lawless tribal regions where top Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders are suspected to be hiding, but concerns have emerged that they may be returning to ex-Soviet Central Asia.

Tajikistan sent troops into the volatile Rasht Valley region near the border with Afghanistan last year amid reports that militants were using Tajik territory to cross from Afghanistan into the heart of Central Asia. Mountainous Tajikistan, the poorest former Soviet republic, shares a porous 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with war-ravaged Afghanistan.