Tajik Blamed in Killings Is Nabbed, Official Says

A Tajik warlord believed to have ordered the 1998 killings of four U.N. workers has been captured in Afghanistan, an official said Saturday.

Mullo Abdullo, a rebel warlord in Tajikistan’s 1992-1997 civil war, was captured last fall near Kandahar and is being held in a prison in the northern Afghan city of Taloqan, a high-ranking Tajik Security Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

Tajik officials say Abdullo was behind the killings of three U.N. military observers and their Tajik translator in July 1998. Three men were sentenced to death for the killings in 1999, but officials said the men had acted on Abdullo’s orders.

The U.N. workers were among 70 observers stationed in Tajikistan to monitor a peace deal that gave the opposition some government positions, bringing to a halt most of the bloodshed that had plagued the country since its independence from the Soviet Union.

Abdullo, one of the most influential rebel commanders, did not accept the 1997 truce. He continued to wield de facto control over an eastern region of Tajikistan until 2000, when he agreed to give up arms in exchange for the government’s promise not to prosecute him for past crimes.

He was fighting on the side of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia when he was captured, the Security Ministry official said.

Many Islamic rebels from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia are believed to have fought with the Taliban. The leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Juma Namangani, was killed during the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban from power, U.S. and Central Asian officials have said.