Uznews, 10 Dec 2009, Osh – The Kyrgyz Supreme Court has turned down an appeal filed by the slain journalist Alisher Saipov’s family to demand that the criminal case into his murder be sent for additional investigation. The court decided that there was nothing more to investigate and that the case could be sent to court.
The father of Alisher Saipov, editor of the Uzbek-language Siyosat newspaper who was killed in Osh on 24 October 2007, Avas Saipov, filed the appeal after the Osh Region court overturned the Osh town court’s decision to send the case for additional investigation.
On 8 July the Osh town court tried resident of Batken Region’s Lyaylyak District Abdufarid Rasulov who was suspected of killing the journalist after police found over 16 kilos of drugs and a gun in his car in February 2009.
At the trial Rasulov denied that he had murdered the journalist and said that he had never even met him. He also said that he had been tortured during the investigation and that his identification by Alisher Saipov’s friend Ikbol Mirsaidov, who is a political analyst, had been set up.
The suspect said that he had been shown to Mirsaidov in advance so he could easily point to him during identification. “I was later told that he had identified me as the person who shot down Saipov,” Rasulov said.
The suspect’s evidence shocked the Saipov family. Since Alisher was murdered, they could not contact or meet Mirsaidov, whom they regarded as Alisher’s friend and who was present when he was shot dead.
The Osh police have been telling the Saipov family for the past two years that the whereabouts of Mirsaidov are unknown, even though he visited Osh two weeks before the trial to identify Rasulov as Alisher’s killer.
Avas Saipov demanded that the main witness attend the trial but Mirsaidov had never turned up in court. It turned out that Mirsaidov worked at the International Institute for Strategic Research in Bishkek all that time.
After Mirsaidov failed to turn up in court by the end of August, the court satisfied Avas Saipov’s motion and sent the case for additional investigation.
The Osh town prosecutor’s office appealed to the Osh Region court against this ruling which was turned down. In protest against the higher court’s decision, Avas Saipov complained to the Supreme Court but it upheld the ruling.
Avas Saipov suspects Ikbol Mirsaidov and two other people of involvement in the murder of his son. He thinks that the killers are linked to the authorities in Tashkent. The father is ready to drop his suspicions about Mirsaidov but this person has been for some reason avoiding contact and the Kyrgyz police have been concealing him from the Saipov family.
“The Kyrgyz authorities have sacrificed their citizen Alisher Saipov,” Avas Saipov told journalists with regret. “If the case is heard in the lowest court, hearings will not be just. They have already fabricated facts and destroyed evidence. I failed to find justice in the Supreme Court, and now I only hope for Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who has been deceived that the case has been uncovered.”
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