Ahmad Ibrohim, chief editor of the independent weekly newspaper Payk, has been detained since August 2024. In January 2025, he was sentenced to 10 years and four months in prison on multiple charges, including extremism and extortion.
Law enforcement officers in the southern city of Kulob arrested Ibrohim on August 12, 2024, on charges of bribing a state security services officer.
Local sources familiar with the case told Radio Ozodi, a local service of the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), that Ibrohim’s arrest appeared to have been a setup. Authorities had refused to extend Payk’s license to operate since March 2024, those sources said, and a state security services officer who had spent several months cultivating a relationship with Ibrohim told the journalist that he could help obtain a license for 2,500 somoni (US$235). After Ibrohim handed over the money, he was arrested.
The only independent media outlet in Tajikistan’s southern Khatlon Province, Payk has previously complained of pressure from local authorities on its staff in retaliation for its critical reports.
On October 17, 2024, Radio Ozodi reported that Ibrohim’s trial was underway behind closed doors in a detention center in Kulob. Authorities had brought two new charges against Ibrohim, accusing him of extremism and extortion, and had classified the case as secret. Ibrohim denied the charges, the outlet reported.
According to Radio Ozodi, the extremism charge related to several articles published between 2016 and 2018. Ibrohim rejected the allegation as “risible,” saying he had spent his life fighting against extremism and had been threatened by prominent Tajik members of the Islamic State militant group over his articles on the subject.
The same outlet reported that investigators had questioned around 100 local officials who made payments to Payk, including for newspaper subscriptions or to buy Ibrohim’s books, and that prosecutors were summoning around 20 of them to appear in court — alleging that Ibrohim had extorted them. One local official told Ozodi that he had been threatened to force him to appear in court, but that he did not plan to testify against Ibrohim. In a letter to Rustam Emomali, the chairman of parliament and son of Tajikistan’s president, reviewed by CPJ, Ibrohim said that none of those who testified in court had said that he extorted them, only that they subscribed to his newspaper.
On January 10, 2025, the court found Ibrohim guilty on all three charges and sentenced him to 10 years and four months in prison.
Mumin Ahmadi, an RFE/RL journalist covering Ibrohim’s case, told CPJ in August 2025 that Ibrohim intended to appeal but had still not received a copy of the verdict in order to do so.
Ibrohim is among nine journalists arrested in Tajikistan between 2022 and mid-2025. The eight other journalists are serving prison sentences of seven to 20 years, many of them convicted on extremism charges and all of them tried behind closed doors, with local journalists telling CPJ that press freedom in Tajikistan was at its lowest point since the country’s civil war 30 years ago.
As of August 2025, Ibrohim was being held at Correctional Facility No. 4 in Dushanbe. Ahmadi told CPJ that Ibrohim’s head was shaking and he appeared to be suffering from neurological issues but was not being provided with specialist care or medicine.
CPJ emailed the State Committee for National Security and the Ministry of Justice, which oversees Tajikistan’s prison system, for comment in September 2025, but did not receive any replies.