Did an arrested Uzbek ‘mafia chieftain’ organise killings of dissidents?

Twelve years ago, an Uzbek hitman tried to kill an exiled imam in Sweden. The rest may not be history, just yet.

On his Swedish visa application, Yuri Zhukovsky said he was an administrator of Pakhtakor, ex-Soviet Uzbekistan’s most popular football club, and attached a letter of recommendation.

The burly, dark-haired 35-year-old arrived in Stockholm in February 2012 and travelled hundreds of kilometres up to Sweden’s frigid north to the Arctic town of Stromsund, an unlikely place to encounter an Uzbek imam.

But there he was – Obid-kori Nazarov, full-bearded and bespectacled, living with his family far from his arid Central Asian home in an apartment provided by the Swedish authorities, who granted him asylum in 2006 after he fled Uzbekistan.

It wasn’t Zhukovsky’s first time in Stromsund. At his trial, he would testify that he had already been there twice to secretly videotape Nazarov. He sent the footage to the man who hired Zhukovsky as a hitman for $200,000.

On February 22, 2012, the 54-year-old imam finished the midday prayer at a nearby mosque and went to his honey-coloured apartment building.