In Tajikistan, an opposition blogger who was expelled from Sweden has been detained.

Negmatov was detained immediately upon his arrival in Dushanbe on December 27. He came to the country with his three daughters, who were handed over to relatives in a village in the northern part of the country. It is not clearly known who conducted the detention and what the blogger is being accused of.

Sources from the Tajik service of RFE/RL report that the authorities accuse Negmatov of being a member of the pan-Islamist organization "Hizb ut-Tahrir," which is banned by local authorities. Relatives state that he is being targeted for criticizing the government and for reposting videos about the Islamic caliphate.

The Negmatov family emigrated to Ukraine in 2019, but with the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion, they moved to Sweden. There, they were denied political asylum several times, as a friend of the Negmatovs told the Tajik service of RFE/RL. The reasons for the deportation have not been disclosed.