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 | owner of the apartment (in red) where the alleged rape took place. Photo credit: Uznews.net |
According to Zuleykho Chorieva, Khasan Choriev’s daughter, her father could not physically have had any contact with the 19 year old woman named Matluba, whom he allegedly raped on June 12.
“He had food poisoning June 11 and had heart troubles that night; his daughter-in-law gave him a shot and the morning of June 12 he had to take his cane with him when he went to the prosecutor’s office,” said Chorieva.
Furthermore, in the last two years Khasan Choriev suffered a heart attack and a stroke.
Serious doubts that an old sick man could rape a 19 year old woman drove family members and human rights activists to take a trip to the Kamashinsk region, in an attempt to find Matluba Abdurakhmanova, and learn first-hand how this accusation came about.
However, Matluba’s mother and sister, horrified by what happened, told the visitors that the young woman had left home three years ago.
She left Kamashinsk region in order to go to college in Tashkent, then she lived somewhere in Qarshi.
She returned home to visit once a month, or every other month, and she called her family by phone but had never told them her address.
It appears that the young woman never lived at the address in Qarshi, where Kashkadarya prosecutors claim the rape took place. Every neighbor in that apartment building stated categorically that the apartment in question is empty and that nobody lived there.
Human rights activists and Choriev’s relatives managed to locate the owner of the apartment, a woman named Nargiza, who resides in another apartment in the building next door.
Nargiza, a successful businesswoman, was very surprised when she learned from the prosecutors that a rape took place in the apartment she purchased a year ago, since she never given the keys to anybody.
She was about to write a complaint about it, but her husband clarified things for her. He told her that on June 17, without the owner’s knowledge, law enforcement officials took him to the apartment that was unlocked for some reason, and asked him to be a witness during a crime scene re-creation. They promised to “leave him alone” after that.
The man saw an old man and a young woman inside the apartment.
“Law enforcement can’t wiggle out of this—there are witnesses to this conversation—Choriev’s family and respected human rights activists like Gulshan Karaeva,” says “Birdamlik’s” director in Uzbekistan Malokhat Eshankulova, who also played an active role in the search for Matluba.
Choriev’s family and human rights workers think that the information they were able to obtain supports their original theory that the elderly Choriev’s arrest is directly related to the fact that his son, opposition leader Bakhodyr Choriev, recently expressed his intent to run for President of Uzbekistan.
Uznews.net