An image of Amriddin Kholmurodov taken from a Facebook invitation to an event in his support organised by the Civic Committee for the Rescue of Hostages and Political Prisoners of Tajikistan. The event took place in August 2023 in front of the European Union representation in Vilnius, Lithuania. (source: FB - Civic Committee for the Rescue of Hostages and Political Prisoners in Tajikistan.)
In March, just 13 days before the second round of the presidential election, Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok (Hlas), dramatically announced that a Tajik citizen suspected of links to terrorists had entered the country during the previous government.
Eštok, who by then had been interior minister for around five months, made the comments after an emergency meeting of the State Security Council attended by presidential candidate Peter Pellegrini.
Pellegrini, who was speaker of parliament at the time, went on to win the election and is now president of Slovakia.
At the time, Pellegrini dismissed question about his presence at the meeting – the speaker holds a senior role in Slovakia's constitional set-up, but the officeholder does not normally attend State Security Council meetings – by saying: "Please don't link the country's security to the [election] campaign. Don't be ridiculous."
Eštok declared that the police had taken unspecified preventive measures due to "potential threats" related to the Easter holiday.
It later emerged that the suspect that Eštok was referring to was probably Amriddin Kholmurodov, who has described himself as a political activist fleeing torture and death in his home country.
Tajikistan is a poor, mostly Muslim republic in central Asia that has been ruled the same president for more than 30 years. Its authoritarian regime places strict limits on how Islam is practised, and has killed, imprisoned and exiled opposition leaders.
The Sme daily recently sought to find out what happened to the Tajik detained in Slovakia.
The Interior Ministry confirmed that he is still being detained in Slovakia, despite having been administratively expelled. And it now turns out that, one month after the second round of the presidential election, another very similar case occurred – but received much less publicity.
Detainee number 1
In March, immediately after the State Security Council meeting, Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok announced that a "high-risk individual from Tajikistan" had entered Slovakia from Ukraine in 2022, along with refugees from that country.
