Five Sunni Muslims jailed in Balkanabat for 12 years each in August 2017 for meeting to study the works of the theologian Said Nursi were transferred recently to new labour camps. The strict-regime labour camp at Bayramali in Mary Region, where four of the five are held, also holds another jailed Nursi reader, 47-year-old Begench Dadebayew. At least two among more than 60 men jailed from 2013 for participating in a Sunni Muslim group in Turkmenabat have been freed after completing their jail terms.
The regime closed all Islamic bookshops in Dushanbe in August and September, as well as some publishers of Islamic literature. The regime has also continued demands that non-Muslim religious communities complete intrusive questionnaires. Some suggested family information is being collected "so that it will be easy to identify us and our family members if in future they decide to target us". "All mosques are under total state control," human rights defenders observed, "so the regime does not need to insist that mosques complete such questionnaires."
On 3 August, days after the secret police arrested him, Badakhshan Regional Court jailed Muzaffar Davlatmirov, a respected 58-year-old Ismaili religious leader, for 5 years for alleged "public calls for extremist activity". "Davlatmirov is not an extremist, and did not call for extremist activity," a local person who knows him told Forum 18. His relatives and friends do not know where he is serving his sentence. The regime has closed all Ismaili prayer houses in the region and the Ismaili Education Centre in Khorugh.
Visiting the closed Catholic Church of Saints Simon and Helena (Red Church) in central Minsk on 12 October, the day the parish was ordered to remove its property, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, retired Archbishop of Minsk-Mogilev, "was crying from the hopelessness of the situation". The worship ban and enforced closure followed a "strange and ambiguous" early-morning fire on 26 September in a small annexe. "Despite the small area of damage, the entire church is sealed and not accessible to the public for holding services," parishioners complained.
On 25 September, Police banned Minsk s New Life Church from meeting for Sunday worship in the car park of the building from which officials forcibly evicted it in February 2021. Police detained the Church s pastor Vyacheslav Goncharenko and another pastor Antoni Bokun. A judge fined each two months average wage for leading the 18 September service which police had observed. Minsk City Executive Committee refuses to return the seized church building or allow the Church to meet for worship in the car park.