KOROLYOV, Russia -- Prosecutors in Tajikistan last week opened the criminal trial of Makhamadruzi Iskandarov, an opposition leader who is accused of involvement in terrorism and creating an illegal armed group in the Central Asian republic. The trial comes four months after he disappeared from this Moscow suburb under circumstances that he describes as a kidnapping.
Iskandarov, who denies all the accusations against him, charges that he was seized by Russian police and transported to Tajikistan in what has come to be known as a rendition, the secret transfer of terrorism suspects between countries without any court proceeding. Iskandarov, leader of the Tajikistan Democratic Party, said he was kidnapped 11 days after the Russian prosecutor general's office denied an extradition request by the Tajik government.
He surfaced in a jail in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, where his trial began on Aug. 2.
"Do I have absolute proof that he was kidnapped by the Russian authorities? No," said Anna Stavitskaya, Iskandarov's Russian attorney. "But without the participation of the Russian security services, his transportation would not have been possible."
Human right organizations said Russian authorities have become emboldened by reports about the U.S. practice of what the CIA calls "extraordinary renditions." Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States has secretly shipped dozens of suspects to countries in Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East that practice torture.
"The Russian authorities are completely free in this situation," said Yelena Ryabinina of Civil Initiative, a human rights group that works with refugees in Russia. "The West cannot complain, and if they do, our leadership can say, 'Look at you, you do the same thing.' It's very sad."
Russian prosecutors declined to discuss the case.
On April 4, after spending four months in a Russian detention center, Iskandarov was freed when the prosecutor general's office refused to extradite him. Iskandarov said he then moved to a friend's apartment in this Moscow suburb and applied for refugee status in an attempt to protect himself from deportation under international law until his case was adjudicated.
Late on the evening of April 15, as Iskandarov walked near his friend's apartment on Soviet Street here, two Russian policemen and a group of plainclothes agents surrounded him, handcuffed him and forced him into a car, according to a statement Iskandarov later gave to his attorneys in Dushanbe. He said he was driven a short distance to a sauna, and on the following night, he was handed over to a second group of men in a nearby forest.
"Those new men put a mask on my face and an additional mask on my eyes and kept me there handcuffed for about an hour," said Iskandarov in his statement. His captors, he said, spoke Russian without an accent.
Iskandarov was then driven for about 30 minutes to an airport, both he and his attorneys said. "Then they put me on the plane," he said, and the following morning he reached Dushanbe, still masked.
His attorney noted that the only airport in the vicinity was the Chkalovsky military airport, 10 miles from Korolyov, site of the Russian space program's mission control.
