DUSHANBE, Jan 29 (News Agencies) - Tajik security forces last year arrested over 100 Islamists from Hizbi Tahrir (Party of Freedom), a clandestine group calling for a revolution, Tajikistan's security minister said Monday.
"The first cells of this group appeared in Tajikistan in 1998," the minister's spokesman Nozirjon Bouriev said.
"Thousands of items of propaganda calling for the violent toppling of the constitutional government were also seized" last year, he added.
Twenty-six members of the group have already been tried here, landing sentences of up to 18 years in prison. They are estimated to have several thousand members in Tajikistan, and be of mainly Uzbek origin.
The official said the party was created in the 1950s by a Palestinian, and is seeking to bring an Islamic state to the mountainous and secular-ruled former-Soviet Central Asian republic.
He said the group had links to Hamas and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and had bases in Afghanistan, Algeria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
