A court in Uzbekistan has sentenced Salim Abduvaliyev, a businessman once described in a U.S. diplomatic cable as a "Tashkent mafia chieftain,” has been sentenced to six years in prison for arms trafficking.
The judge presiding over Abduvaliyev’s trial at Tashkent’s Mirabad district court waived imposing a sentence for a smuggling charge due to the statute of limitations, the court said in a statement released on March 23.
The verdict was handed down on March 19, but it is common for court rulings in Uzbekistan to be reported several days after the fact.
Abduvaliyev, 73, was detained in Tashkent in December on suspicion of illegal possession of firearms. News of the arrest came as a surprise to many, even though the police claimed they had been investigating Abduvaliyev “for years.”
“This information [we received] was checked not in one or two days, but over months and years,” Doniyor Tashkhodjayev, a deputy head of the Tashkent police, told journalists after the arrest. “When we had 100 percent confirmation that he had firearms illegally stored at his home, we conducted a search.”
In the weeks following Abduvaliyev’s arrest, dozens of men suspected of extortion, fraud, and drug production were taken into custody across the country in what law enforcement officials cast as a campaign against organized crime and street gangs.
The detainees included another high-profile figure from the Uzbek underworld: Bakhtiyor Kudratullayev, who is known by the nickmake Bakhti Tashkentsky. RFE/RL’s Uzbek service, Radio Ozodlik, reported in 2018 that Kudratullayev, 52, had organized the first gathering of “thieves-in-law,” high-ranking gangsters from across the post-Soviet space, in Tashkent in 20 years.
Few figures are as notorious as Abduvaliyev, though.
A U.S. diplomatic cable obtained and disseminated by the Wikileaks website in 2011 described him as enjoying close connections with the government of the time.
Toward the end of the late President Islam Karimov’s time in office, Abduvaliyev sought to keep a low profile. But things changed following Karimov’s death in 2016, when Shavkat Mirziyoyev became president. That year, he went as far as to pose for a photo bearing a picture of Mirziyoyev and the inscription “My president.”
In 2017, Abduvaliyev, a former wrestler, was appointed vice president of Uzbekistan’s National Olympic Committee and head of the Uzbekistan Wrestling Association. Local press deferentially referred to him as “an entrepreneur” and a “philanthropist”. He has received multiple awards over the years, including the title of “Honored Sports Trainer,” bestowed on him by Mirziyoyev in 2021.
It is unclear what Abduvaliyev did to fall so dramatically out of favor. Remarks by Mirziyoyev in December, however, suggested that he is intent on a draining the scene of informal powerbrokers in Uzbekistan.
“Whether it is criminal groups … or officials mired in corruption, if someone flouts the law and causes harm to the state and society, we will never be able to stand by and watch it,” Mirizyoeyv said in December. “In ‘New Uzbekistan,’ the law must prevail, and punishment for crimes must be inevitable”.
