As soon as the Range Rover began to slow down at a light, at a railway crossing in the wealthy Qibray suburb of Tashkent, the sound of gunfire exploded into the night.
Inside the car, Komil Allamjonov, one of Uzbekistan’s most recognisable political and media figures and a former press secretary to the president, did not immediately grasp what was going on.
“It was raining, it was dark, I couldn’t see anything. I thought, maybe the lights along the railway tracks were short-circuiting,” Allamjonov recalled. Then, four bullets hit the vehicle. “I told my driver . . . Hit the gas!”
The car managed to back out and escape. Later, Allamjonov would discover that his assailant’s weapon, an old Kalashnikov, had jammed. It is, he told the Financial Times, the best explanation for why he survived.
The assassination attempt against Allamjonov, a close ally of one of the president’s daughters, has rocked Uzbekistan, where political killings and gun violence are extremely rare.
It has also raised questions about tensions within the ruling family over the future of the Central Asian nation, and triggered an elaborate manhunt that has led investigators as far as South Korea and the Russian republic of Chechnya, as well as deep into the heart of the country’s political elite.
Several top security officials have been removed from their jobs in the biggest purge of the political establishment since President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took office eight years ago, pitching himself as a more modern, reform-minded — but still authoritarian — leader of the 35mn-strong nation than his predecessor, Islam Karimov.
“This is an unprecedented event. This is not normal for Uzbekistan,” said Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, focused on Central Asia. “Intra-elite conflicts are usually solved quietly, under the radar.”
Though rumours have abounded of rifts within the ruling class, Umarov said: “No one ever thought that this conflict could become so dangerous, that there would be guns used, by killers shooting in a residential neighbourhood.”
In the decades following its founding as an independent state after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan was mostly known for gross human rights abuses, the kleptocratic rule of its leader Karimov, and the jet set lifestyle of his billionaire daughter Gulnara, which landed her in jail after she fell out favour with her father.
But after Karimov’s death in 2016, his successor launched a reform and rebranding drive for Uzbekistan.
Mirziyoyev released several high-profile political prisoners, spoke of modernising the economy and strengthening media freedoms, and introduced policies curbing forced and child labour. International newspapers and western officials queried whether an Uzbek spring was in the air.
Allamjonov, appointed by Mirziyoyev as his press secretary, helped shape the new president’s image as a reformer, as well as Uzbekistan’s pitch as a more open and investment-friendly place.
Much of the reform rhetoric did not translate into action, however, and the process stalled. Uzbekistan’s economy remains highly centralised and personalistic, analysts say, while media freedoms are again in decline.
Protests in the restive region of Karakalpakstan in 2022 were crushed with force, leaving at least 21 people dead. A 2023 constitutional reform, rather than sharing power, concentrated it further in the hands of the president.
But Allamjonov has continued to play an influential role, particularly through his close alliance with the president’s eldest daughter, 40-year-old Saida Mirziyoyeva.
The duo “said the right things about supporting reform, about free expression”, said Steve Swerdlow, a Central Asia expert and human rights lawyer at the University of Southern California.
Though repressions against bloggers and journalists grew, and other freedoms declined, the pair sought to “send the message that the Uzbekistan we see today is more enlightened, more open, more hip, more TikTok”.
But as the eldest daughter’s star rose, observers spoke of increasing competition with her younger sister Shahnoza’s husband, Otabek Umarov, though the family presented a united front.
Known for his wealthy lifestyle, patronage of mixed martial arts, and popular streetwear brand, Umarov is a “classic representative of the golden youth of Tashkent”, said Carnegie expert Umarov, who is not a relation. He also wielded hefty political power as deputy head of the president’s security service.
A military court held a closed trial of suspects in the botched assassination this month. Ten sentences were handed down on Wednesday, but only five of the offenders were publicly named.
None of the ruling family were among them, and there is no suggestion that any of its members including Umarov are linked to the attack.
But three members of the security establishment were among those publicly sentenced, pointing to a high-level case.
“The attack was a big shock to me,” Allamjonov said. “I never thought anyone would be capable of such a thing.”
The FT contacted Allamjonov by phone in Tashkent. He described his experience of the night of the shooting but could not comment further because of the legal process.
That night, two black-clad culprits escaped from the scene on motorbikes. They raced to the city of Fergana, five hours east of Tashkent, hoping to cross the border into Kyrgyzstan.
But police were in pursuit, and the pair soon found themselves encircled. Realising they were about to be caught, they recorded a video and posted it to social media.
“We only did this for the money,” one of the hitmen said. Then he bizarrely claimed Allamjonov had staged the whole thing himself as a publicity stunt. The police brought them in.
Unravelling the complex web behind the two hitmen led investigators to the Russian republic of Chechnya.
Reporters at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Uzbek service found one of the hitmen had been briefly detained in Turkey in 2021, over an apparent plot to kill exiled Chechen critics of the republic’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov there.
Law enforcement named two more men, both Chechen Russian nationals, accusing them of briefly entering Uzbekistan to bring in the weapons used in the attack. Tashkent issued an international arrest warrant and called on Chechnya to extradite them. Kadyrov refused, and denied any Chechen role in the attack.
“The media . . . claimed I took part in the preparation of the assassination attempt,” Kadyrov said in a post on Telegram. “But if I had prepared it, I would have finished the job.”
The Chechen leader then described himself as “friends with an influential family” in Uzbekistan and called the developments an attempt to “deprive the president of a loyal entourage”.
Then he issued a direct threat: “To Komil Allamjonov . . . Stop now, or you will have to answer for all the intrigues,” he said. “I am talking about answering according to our traditions.” Chechnya is known for its blood feud customs.
Within a month of the shooting, several high-level members of the state security services were demoted from their jobs. Umarov was also dismissed from his powerful security services position, sources told RFE/RL, and given a role on the country’s Olympic committee.
Another road led investigators to South Korea.
Searching through the apartments of the hitmen produced new leads, and an Uzbek businessman named Javlon Yunusov was arrested in South Korea, where he owns several businesses, and extradited to Uzbekistan, the general prosecutor’s office of Uzbekistan said in a statement.
On January 30, the trial of multiple suspects began behind closed doors, in a military court, with 10 sentences subsequently handed down. Five were declared publicly by the press office of Uzbekistan’s supreme court.
Yunusov, the businessman detained in South Korea, was given 18 years. Shukhrat Rasulov, the former head of presidential security, was sentenced to 23 years. The first deputy chief of Tashkent police was also given seven years. The two hitmen were given 23 years each.
But the shooting is likely to continue reverberating through the country’s elite, revealing a fundamental weakness at the heart of president Mirziyoyev’s grip on power, Carnegie expert Umarov said.
“He started to merge the family and the state,” Umarov said, “meaning any conflict within the family turns into a nationwide conflict.”
His predecessor Karimov kept his jet-setting daughter Gulnara away from government, allowing her to serve in diplomatic roles but never giving her positions with real executive power.
“At the moment she actually tried to influence the balance within the elites, Karimov himself put her under house arrest,” Umarov said. The once-powerful socialite remains in prison near Tashkent.
Mirziyoyev has not commented on the Allamjonov case publicly. “[He] has probably learnt a lot of lessons from the Gulnara drama,” Swerdlow said.
“I think he badly wants to avoid that sort of Shakespearean tragedy from playing out in his family and presidency.”
