Mob Storms Tajikistan’s Presidency, Takes Hostages : Unrest: Protesters want the leader of the Central Asian republic to resign.

Hundreds of protesters stormed the offices of President Rakhman Nabiyev in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan on Monday and took members of Nabiyev’s staff and other officials hostage, Russian news agencies reported.

The Itar-Tass news agency said the demonstrators occupied the ground floor of the presidential palace in the capital of Dushanbe.

A second agency, Nega, said that two deputy prime ministers, a military adviser to Nabiyev and a fourth official “in charge of Cabinet business” were taken away by the angry crowd to an unknown location. Demonstrators at the scene said they would be held until Nabiyev, whose whereabouts were not known, agreed to talks.

In other unrest in the former Soviet Union, fighters ignored a cease-fire agreement in the secessionist Abkhazia area of Georgia, and a prospective truce also appeared threatened by new Armenian-Azerbaijani violence that reportedly killed scores of people in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Vladimir Gogolashvili said that 25 Georgian troops were killed and 50 wounded in weekend clashes in Abkhazia.

Tajikistan’s Nabiyev, a former Communist Party boss, won his way back to power in elections in that former Soviet republic last November.

In May he survived a mass rebellion by inviting the liberal and Islamic opposition to help form a broad government coalition. Since then, his freedom of political maneuver has been strictly limited.

Armed opposition groups have recently stepped up resistance in the Kurgan-Tyube region of southern Tajikistan, and the assassination of a top judicial official in Dushanbe last week raised fears of a new wave of mass violence.

Itar-Tass said the demonstrators were demanding Nabiyev’s resignation and the release of an army general suspected of involvement in the assassination Aug. 24 of Chief Prosecutor Nurullo Khuvaidullayev.

They said that Gen. Rakhim Nurullobekov was being held in connection with the killing.

Itar-Tass said the protesters were also angry at Nabiyev’s failure to put an end to bloodshed and unrest in the south of the country, where border raids and weapons smuggling from neighboring Afghanistan are commonplace.

Tajikistan, a mainly Muslim state, is among the poorest of the former Soviet republics that gained independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union last year.

Officials say Nabiyev is considering inviting a Russian-led peacekeeping force into troubled regions of Tajikistan, but opposition leaders argue this could lead to an all-out civil war and fuel Islamic fundamentalism.

Palace Siege

Protesters took control of presidential palace’s ground floor in Dushanbe