A top general with Tajikistan's national security service has died after being pulled out of his car by a gang of tobacco smugglers and stabbed repeatedly, officials said on Sunday. Abdullo Nazarov, 56, had served as the deputy head of the State Committee for National Security (ex-KGB) until being assigned to the Gorno-Badakhshan province in the soaring Pamir Mountains near Afghanistan in 2010.
He was pulled out of his service car late Saturday and stabbed to death by unknown assailants although three armed subordinates were with him at the time, the security committee said in a statement.
Nazarov's team had earlier infiltrated a powerful gang of tobacco smugglers in the remote eastern region and had recently begun making their first arrests, a security official told AFP.
The committee did not provide further details of the incident or say what happened to Nazarov's three subordinates after the attack. Tajikistan is the poorest of the ex-Soviet republics and has been overrun by crime and drugs trafficking since an early 1990s civil war claimed an estimated 150,000 lives.